7/8/17 Ride C2C Day 21 Dupuyer to Choteau

7/8/17 Day 21 Dupuyer to Choteau
Miles: 34. Total Miles: 989.6

Depart: 7:00am - Arrive: 10:00am Choteau Mountain View RV & Tent

After getting beat up in the heat and wind all day yesterday, we are so glad that today will be a short day and … No wind! It was a pretty chilly start...we are on the road at about 7am and are greeted with a hill out of town. We had rolling hills which look much better today than they did yesterday. We went up and then generally down - nothing but road and prarie between Dupuyer and Choteau.

[caption id="attachment_1788" align="alignnone" width="800"] Hwy 89 Dupuyer to Choteau[/caption]

We roll in to the one-main street town early and have a breakfast. They had freshly baked cinnamon rolls so I couldn’t resist. Delicious!

There is a campground on our map ½ mile off the main road (right across from the seed plant) and as we are riding there thinking not a good idea - looks like no shade and the temp is supposed to reach 98 today.

[caption id="attachment_1793" align="alignnone" width="800"] "All the seeds you'll ever need"[/caption]

The owners of this private RV camp were so nice - they purchased it a couple of years ago and refurbished it. The tent area was pretty cool - there was a wooden structure in the center with a table, storage, and electricity and 6 radiating triangular bays for the tent sites. So we had privacy by the fences separating each bay. We picked the site that would give us the most shade - it was getting brutally hot.

After reading and writing in the shade for a couple of hours, we walked into town to go to the pioneer/dinosaur museum. It was outstanding! Inside were artifacts and documents of early settler life, including the book of criminal records complete with pictures of the accused and the crime,a formal invitation to the last “hanging” (only 200 were invited), and a human skeleton with arrow heads lodged in the bone in 3 places. Then the dinosaurs! Montana was once a lush, tropical climate and many remains of dinosaurs have been found in the state.

[caption id="attachment_1794" align="alignnone" width="768"] Old Sol at the Choteau Museum[/caption]

We had lunch at a rather sleepy restaurant and Doug is proud to say that he had a “Montana lunch” of hot beef sandwich. I had a pretty good Reuben. We walked to the town hall building to check it out (it had a tumultuous past) and then we stopped at the grocery store for dinner/breakfast/lunch supplies and took a detour through the shady city park on our very hot walk back to camp.

Back at camp it is still too hot to move much, so we got some cold ice teas, read, and played Gin Rummy. We looked at the weather report for the next week in Montana and it would be 95-99 degrees in the areas we wanted to ride.

[caption id="attachment_1787" align="alignnone" width="768"] 98 degrees...too hot to ride[/caption]

That kind of heat is just not fun - all we do is start as early as we can, end by 1 or 2, then hide from the sun for the rest of the day.  Plus it is a little dangerous for bike riding - so we made the decision to end our trip in Great Falls.

A quick dinner of stir fried lemon pepper chicken. Said hello to our fellow tent campers who were a young couple from Boston on a long car road trip that included the Olympic peninsula. The full moon was giant as it rose at the foot of our tent.