Bicycling the Lewis & Clark Trail
Garrison to Washburn, ND

Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Distance Cycled: 38 miles
Vertically Climbed: 530 feet
Average Speed: 15.1 mph

We woke up to what looked like a very nice day. We had an excellent home cooked meal at the Robin's Nest B&B. We had hot fresh blueberry muffins, oatmeal, 2 kinds of juice, fresh fruit, sausage, omelets, milk, tea and coffee. We enjoyed being spoiled by the owner Joanne. We would recommend this B & B to any cyclists.

The sun was shinning and we did not see a lot of clouds in the sky. We headed east with a great tail wind and after 6 miles turned south to cross a causeway that allows cars and trains to cross the lake formed behind the Garrison Dam on the Missouri River. As we continued south, we looked west at a very pretty rainbow. This meant that it was raining west of us and a strong wind was from the northwest so that rain was headed toward us. On top of that our route turned west for about 13 miles which would take us into the heart of this approaching storm. After riding one mile in the sprinkles we decided to change our route and turned east until we came to the highway going south that we had left just a short time ago. We than began a race to get far enough south to avoid being drenched by the approaching rain storm. We began to get sprinkled on within a short time after turning south but we did not get rained on until we were within 3 miles of Washburn. We stopped at another Cenex gas station and Jim stuffed paper towels between his skin and shirts in order to keep warm and to absorb some of the moisture. He had to change the paper towels 3 times.

After drinking hot chocolate and getting warm we all headed to another Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. It seems that every town has put up one of these centers to get the tourists to stop. This one was different in that they had a number of very nice paintings of different things that occurred during the two years of the expedition. It was still raining hard when we were ready to leave the Interpretive Center. Jane and George decided to ride down to Fort Mandan. The rest of us went back to the Cenex gas station for some hot food and hope of warming up. It was still raining, so we decided to ride on to the motel.