Daily Summary

The Ride

This was pretty much a recovery ride with lots of downhill. My heartrate was barely over 100 most of the day. We were only supposed to do ~30 miles today. But, that left us with 125 miles tomorrow of mostly uphill tomorrow. We all talked and agreed to ride 25 or so miles past Missoula on the route for tomorrow and then get shuttled back to the hotel. Now, tomorrow, we’ll shuttle back to that same spot to start and have “only” about 100 uphill miles tomorrow. Given I was feeling my leg after yesterday, I am a bit nervous about tomorrow.

It was a chilly morning and stayed that way. The ride was uneventful. We were all so tired from yesterday we just knocked it out. A good chunk was on a main road with a wide shoulder. So, it was totally safe, but not quiet and relaxing like yesterday due to the traffic and noise.

The Sights

This side of the last mountains is different. You can see how we started and then we quickly saw some snow caps still remaining in June. I got another picture of the rolling hills behind me.

The terrain is much rockier. A lot of slopes don’t have a ton of trees due to the rocks. Also, a ton of hillsides have rockslides that took out a lot of trees. There were also big areas that clearly burned in recent times and so not much was standing and growth was just starting again.

The Town And Food

Missoula is bigger than I expected. I got a picture of a main drag we are on. We stopped in town for lunch at a deli before our extra miles. We are at a boutique hotel that’s pretty nice.

For dinner, we ended up at a BBQ joint called “Notorious P.I.G”. For those of you who don’t follow rap music like me, that’s a play on the famous rapper Notorious B.I.G. (I promise you have heard some of his songs even if you don’t listen to rap often!) Their sign out front said, “We’ve got 99 problems and BBQ ain’t one!” That’s a play on a famous line from an old school rap song too. So, I liked this place! The beans and applesauce rocked. I also loved the tea dispensers with Ice-T the rapper on them. A good stop! We got huckleberry ice cream at another shop on the way back to the hotel.