Day 7, See, it got harder, like we said it would

From Missoula to Butte, 134 miles, 7:25 ride time and 18.1mph average including 4900 feet of climbing. Another beautiful day of blue skies and mountains and rivers and all the things you expect in a Montana summer, plus road kill, more on that later.

For the first morning Tom and I weren't last out of the parking lot, which was interesting to watch happen. At exactly 7:00 (can't load bags til then, remember the atomic clock on the trailer? no loading til it's time to load, a Lon Rule) there was a line 20 people long waiting to dump their bags. By 7:04 many bags were loaded and the parking lot was 1/2 empty of bikes. We were somewhere towards the end of the scrum, but still earlier than usual, with arm warmers and vests for a 60 something degree morning. The route was on Rt 200 east and a frontage road for 17 miles, then onto I90 in a 6 person fast paceline for 17 miles, and then a frontage road til we were 51 miles down the road and turned onto Rt 1, the Pintler Scenic Route. It was definitely scenic, we turned a corner coming into Phillipsburg where we had lunch with big mountains capped with snow straight ahead (the... Pioneers?). Post lunch a quick climb (after a long morning of rolling hills and edging upward) to Georgetown Lake at about 6300 feet, then fast down into Anaconda and I90/backroads into Butte. Two long days in a row, some tired faces tonight and slow standing up from dinner as a result, but everyone seems to be in a good mood (the smoothies that Susan made for us while cleaning bikes helped). Dinner was across the street at a Casino\restaurant, nobody was walking much further than that. The one thing that is mounting is annoyance that we can't stop more often: there are small museums, interesting main streets, antique shops, outlooks, the Butte copper mine (one dang big hole in the ground) and yet we left at 7 and arrived at 4:30 so we feel pressured to keep going in the midst of so many possible distractions.

Road kill was more interesting today, 2 deer, 1 fox, 4 skunks and a couple rabbits. Greg, the 17 year old on his 3rd cross country tour (!), didn't find a single license plate though, he collects the ones he finds by side of the road and found 5 of them yesterday. That said, we did all ride over one (including him) but he was in a paceline and didn't dare stop to pick it up.

And a special treat, Ned's sister Buffy was driving to Missoula today and spotted us and pulled over to wave her arms so we'd stop; she knew to look for us and was great to see someone familiar out in the wilds of Montana.