I woke up this morning at 6:30ish and wondered why it was still dark. I opened up the shades and was greeted by dense fog. Uh-oh. I waited. And I waited some more. The fog didn't seem to be dissipating at all. Sometime after 8am, Lailla said that we should drive out to today's starting point to see if conditions were any better there. They weren't. Riding on the state highway with quarter mile visibility seemed like a bad idea. But a few miles into today's planned ride was quite a few miles of "No Motor Vehicles" rec path through the city. So we jumped ahead to the rec path and I started riding a little after 9am. By the time I had completed the rec path, there were patches of blue sky and the fog was gone. So I started cranking out the miles toward my planned finish point of Napolean, ND. I reached Napolean just before 4pm, having logged 77.5 miles. Lailla picked me up and we drove for over an hour to get back to the starting point, which was close to our lodging for the evening. I hopped on my bike and finished the first the five-plus miles until the start of the rec path section. So my only gap on this ride is still the one mile through the construction zone on August 25th.

I also didn't take many photos today. The landscape was dominated by relatively flat fields of corn. There were some other crops such as sunflowers and wheat and some sort of bean, but corn was dominant. So I didn't take any additional pictures of corn fields. You've seen it. Here are the few pictures I did take:

The MIssouri River near Bismarck. There was still a little fog downriver a bit, but it was mostly clearing by this point.

I saw this hawk drinking from a rain puddle this morning. I was closer to him than this picture appears. I could tell he was thinking about flying away, but I managed to snap a couple photos and ride away, leaving him to his rain puddle.

I snapped this photo of some maintenance work on a railroad bridge over the Missouri River. This was taken from the car, so I cropped out the concrete barrier from the bottom third of the picture.

Comments

  1. Bill WAugust 31, 2025 at 7:05 PM

    Good show! It is interesting how we simply do not want to cheat connecting the dots! I did the same thing when I ran into a snowstorm early on my ride. Skipped ahead in a vehicle and then returned to ride the skipped part of the road. Fortunately, I did not have to go back more than a couple miles to fill in the gap. Ended up with more overall miles but no gaps in the trip.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LaillaAugust 31, 2025 at 8:13 PM

    Really glad we decided that we liked the place we were staying and decided to sit tight for an extra night. We figured his planned finish for the day would be about equidistant from where we were to the next decent sized wide spot, so when we went back to the start to get those 5 miles, I didn’t have to turn around and go all the way to the end again. Whew! Somehow that worked out.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AlexSeptember 1, 2025 at 7:45 AM

    Good strategy! And don’t sweat the missing mile. 😃

    ReplyDelete

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