Day 6 - Into Montana

Day 6 – Tuesday May 26, 2009
Start: Dickinson, ND
End: Shelby, MT
Trip Miles Today: 501
Total Trip Miles: 2626

Unlike yesterday, a day best forgotten, the weather gods promised an excellent outlook for today. And boy did they deliver! I hit the road early, at 6:30 am. The miracle of crossing time zones from East to West, is that one doesn't have time to adapt overnight so you just naturally wake up REALLY early! The flip side is that I expect to pay it all back on the return trip in a few weeks. But for now let's just leave it at this...I'm finding it VERY easy to rise and shine bad early! So, one again I was Westbound on I-94 headed for the Montana State Line. In one of my more misguided moves so far, I did not fuel up the bike last evening so I started the day with less than half a tank. Actually it was way less than 1/2 as yesterday's fuel mileage was abysmal, primarily due to the stiff headwinds. Anyway, I started looking for a service station about 1/2 hour into my trip but all I saw were highway exits posted "No Services". First of all, understand that in Western North Dakota there aren't that many exits and to see them all posted "No Services" began to leave me with a somewhat sickening feeling deep in my stomach. The "low fuel" light had come on when, finally, this most beautiful of Conoco station appeared out of the mists. Gassed and coffied up it was on to Montana. I finally left I-94 near Glendive, MT to begin Northward toward a small town called Wolf Point, where I again turned West on US Route 2. These roads may look like secondary roads when you see them on a map but tey are all trunk routes. They are wide, well paved, and REALLY STRAIGHT. Speed limits are posted at 70 - this for a road in Pennsylvania that would be posted at 40 or 45 mph. The roads are so empty that you can make freeway type time from city to city. Through the mid-afternoon I went 250 miles in just about 4 hours...including 2 fuel stops. Those roads made it easy to get 3/4 of the way across Montana in a single day. Montana is a fascinating place with spectacular scenery, interesting people, and a real Old West feel to everything. Also, every town has a casino or 5...Including ones that double as gas stations! Today was the final 500 mile day that I anticipate until my return trip. This is all sort of a grand plan...to make big miles for the first 5 or 6 days, to get through the more nondescript portion of the journey, and position myself so that once I arrived in Canada I could fall back to 250-300 mile days while having more time for stops, photo ops and such. As I sit here in my motel in Shelby, MT I look forward to such a short day tomorrow. I'm only 50 miles from the Canadian border and just another 200 miles to Calgary. It looks like the weather is holding and if so then it will be up to Calgary tomorrow followed by Banff, Lake Louise, and Jasper Thursday. Hope my luck holds! More soon. Thanks for dropping in!

A couple of other web sites have picked up the story of my ride. Check 'em out.
First go to http://technicallyphilly.com and scroll down till you see the May 25 article - you'll find it! Then check out a story from last week in an online business pub called Keystone Edge. To read it, Click here

If you go to the RevZilla Motorsports blogsite at blog.revzilla.com you can see more pictures and find more info on my ride.


The 2009 Ride to Alaska for The Austin Hatcher Foundation is supported by
RevZilla Motorsports at RevZilla.com and by Hermy's Cycles in Port Clinton, PA