Today was another one of those interesting rides. It was 80 miles from Missoula to Philipsburg. I rode with Hayden and Brentley who I haven't ridden with before so I was excited for that, plus the three of us are strong riders, but our crew chief asked us to be sweeps so we really were not working very hard for most of the ride, just maintaining a safe distance from the last pace line who had a guy coming back from being sick and another guy with some pain in his achilles tendon. Since we were moving pretty slow for most of the ride it was easy to talk and I had been wanting to talk more with Brentley for a while. Brentley is such a genuine guy and hilarious, lots of good laughs on the bike, he is from Mississippi and wants to open his own day care, his parents and grandparents both own a day care and he works at his parents in Mississippi. He is also just as in love with his girlfriend as I am with mine so it was fun to share a little about our relationships and how we met them and how quickly we knew they were the perfect woman for us, they have been dating for just about as long as we have too, for Emily and I it will be a year and a half on Saturday, Brentley and I are both looking forward to many more years with our girlfriends. Other than that he was asking a lot about the kind of engineering I want to do and maybe one day I will help him build a green building for his day care, the connections we are making with teammates will be lifelong so it could happen one day, that would be awesome, you never know. Also talked a bunch about arrival, already getting crazy excited for it even though it is still so far out. Best part of the ride was definitely the conversation today, it was fun to ride with Hayden again, making sheep noises by riding over the rumble strips and getting to know Brentley better.
25 miles into the ride we had to switch to Interstate 90 (I though that was kind of cool because I trained on the I-90 in Washington) for 20 miles but to challenge ourselves we gave the pace line ahead of us maybe 15 minutes head start to see how fast we could catch up to them on the highway and we caught them 9 miles out from the crew stop in under 30 minutes, did that a couple times just so we could ride fast for a bit and riding on the Interstate is fun but we try to avoid it for safety reasons. In my opinion I felt safer on the 20 miles of interstate with an 8 foot wide shoulder than I did on some small 2 lane highways we have been on, especially a stretch of road we had toward the end of the ride today. It was worse than the awful road we had in Washington, it literally was gravel that they pressed into the road which apparently makes it safer in the winter but it is summer! We could hardly tell the difference between the shoulder, the loose gravel off the edge of the road and the rumble strip on the left side of the shoulder, on a bunch of it we had a foot and a half of shoulder to ride on. To make it worse, by the time we got to it there were strong cross winds which made it difficult to stay on the "rideable" section of the road, but at least there was barely any traffic and we all made it through without a flat or any accidents, we just couldn't ride faster than 13mph. We are all suggesting they find a different route for next year. Finally we make it through that, we end up handing off sweeps position to the pace line ahead of us and ride another 13 miles all through strong head winds until we get red flagged due to construction but our project manager wanted to give us a chance to ride more miles even though we all missed rack point by more than an hour and he had this weird system to get us another 3 miles so we had to sit at this red flag for 30 min just to ride 3 more miles up the road to the construction where we all got racked and drove to lodging. To sum it up the last 30 miles were very frustrating. However the good laughs and conversation made it all worth it, every ride is worth it.
We didn't have a friendship visit here because Philipsburg is pretty small town but once we got showered we headed to their small downtown and visited "the world's greatest candy shop" it was really awesome, got some delicious sour candy and chocolates, tasted incredible chocolate and huckleberry fudge, it is such a small town and such nice people. The rotary club sponsored our dinner, catered by a award winning BBQ restaurant in town and this evening we tasted some local beers from Philipsburg Brewing Company which were so good and run by an incredible lady that gave us all some free souvenirs. Everyone we run into remembers the guys coming through every year and ia so nice to us, we all really appreciate it.
Tomorrow we have a short 60 mile ride with a steep 15 mile climb to kick it off but looking forward to a long downhill, so many free miles just coasting downhill for a while after that and we arrive in Butte Montana at the end of the day.
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