Yesterday, while in Minot, we ate breakfast at Schatz’s, where our waiter had an outrageously cool “dekotaaa” accent – half-way through my breakfast burrito I said to Amanda that I had a good feeing about finding a bike in this town.

For those of you new to the blog, a few weeks ago, in Idaho, the bike was (mounted to the rear of the van) backed into a tree, and the frame snapped. It was sad.

Ever since, I’ve been looking in every bike shop we passed for a new used replacement – with no luck. So after eating we ran back into town, returned some rain coats we bought at Target, bought some Coldstone icecream, and went to Val’s Cyclery. When I asked if they had any used road bikes, they took me to the back and pointed to the only one they had in the store – which they had gotten only that morning.

It was a beautiful / sexy red Schwinn road bicycle – light as feather – and cheap too. $175 as is, it was obviously much, much more than that new. Barely ridden.

We paid, strapped it to the back of the van, along-side my old now-deformed bike, and drove east on the 2 to catch up with Larry. He about had heart-attack when he saw the bike – we popped off the pedals from my old bike and put them on the new one, and I rode about 5 miles with Larry, into the strong winds (which are blowing the wrong way, east to west, and have been for days).

We stopped at Ganville to look for two girl bicyclist we’ve been hearing so much about, but no one was there. The town had a cool vibe to it, in an old abandoned kind of way, so I leaned the bicycle up against the back of the van and walked around taking some video. As I reached the end of the block (only about 200 feet away from the van), Amanda called my cell phone, she was crying when I answered. “Your gonna’ kill me”, she said, and I knew what happened right away. Amanda was far more upset than I was, she felt horrible, but luckily the damage wasn’t to the frame this time. There was a tiny amount of bend’age near the derailer, but the rear tire came out all crazy.

We woke up this morning and drove an hour back into town – the guy at the bike shop was a bit surprised to see us again so soon. But “yay”, he managed to bend the frame back into place, and found a cheap replacement wheel. She’s back in business!

We spent about an hour poking around an old abandoned farm house yesterday evening. I love old houses – so much subtle history to them: the 1967 copy of reader’s digest on the floor… the years and years worth of pigeon shit covering everything… the two flower-patterned kitchen chairs left behind… the scattered baseball cards in the stairway leading to the second story. The empty rusted-out bed-frames in the master bedroom – from the looks of what’s left, 40-some years ago, it used to be a really fantastic little place.

[5 hours later]

We just finished hanging out on the side of the road with Larry – this head-wind is “sucking his will to live” (Wayne’s World quote). But joking aside, when he caught up with us, he was not too happy. I know the feeling… I sympathize.

We’re on our way into Esmond, Nd – Larry wanted to push on past Devil’s Lake, but it’s another 26 miles straight into the “light breeze”. Half of this town is gone and boarded up – it’s been like that a lot lately.

Well, we just arrived at the park for the night – covered pavilions, quarter-showers, volleyball pit – cool place. The cafe’ is about the only thing still open this time of night, I think we’ll go check it out.