Previous entry: "Lame Deer to Broadus" | Next entry: "Alzada, MT to Nisland, SD" 08/02/2007 Entry: "Broadus to Alzada" We slept well in our beds (!) in John & Amy's house, two fans blowing a cool breeze over us. We woke up in the morning to little John Gregory shouting, "Mom!" He was the last one to sleep, I think, and the first to wake up. Wandered downstairs to a breakfast of hardboiled eggs, french toast, oatmeal, fruit salad, and cherries. Delicious! Seager was feeling under the weather and thought it was due to the dehydration from the ride into Broadus the day before. John and Amy offered to drive him to Alzada later in the day, so he slept in a nice cozy bed in Alzada, out of the sun, the whole day. We got out around 8:30am, and rode for awhile. It was very flat and very grassy. We started off with a headwind, but that disappeared as the day wore on and the sun became stronger. There was really only one big hill to mention. Minwah was riding ahead of me on the hill, both of us keeping a steady pace up it. She was riding in a straight line, then all of a sudden swerved and toppled over! She was not badly injured but added another mark on her fall tally. There were more pretty prairie flowers by the side of the road, but aside from that, in Ariel's words, there was a lot of the "mind-numbing landscape of southeastern Montana". It WAS boring. AND hot. So we pushed on through the mind-numbing landscape of southeastern Montana. Eventually we made it to Alzada. I pulled into a biker bar and had several bikers look on with amusement as I attempted to stand up my bike and finally succeeded. They wanted to know about my trip, so I chatted with them a bunch and asked them about their tour. They said the were headed to spear fish for the night, so, having lived in Hawai'i for a year, I thought this was an unusual place for the activity but a perfectly reasonable thing for people to do, so I asked, "Oh, do you carry your spears on your bikes?" Well, this got a lot of laughs because they were going to Spearfish, SD, and now Seager, Minwah, and Ariel all secretly think that I'm a natural blonde. Alzada consisted of the biker bar (the Stoneville Saloon), a gas station (the one with the dinosaur on the sign), and another cafe/bar. The biker bar was the main thing, with a sign outside that said "Cheap beer--lousy food" which we later found to be false advertising since the food was quite tasty. Minwah and Ariel rode in a little while after I did, and we sat around for awhile and recovered from the heat. We later learned that the temperature was 105F, which I am glad I didn't know while I was biking. We were so beat by the heat that we decided to order dinner at the bar, so we went inside. The bar was dimly lit, with an air-conditioner or giant fan thing blowing...I don't know whether it was really an air-conditioner because it was still quite warm in there and the doors were wide open. The floor was covered in sawdust and the walls were covered in romance novel cover-type art done by the owner and also lots of insulting/ironic slogans of the type found on t-shirts. The only person in the bar was the waitress/owner Diane Turko, a biker to the core. She was thin and wiry, with a deep tan, leopard print tattoos on her right shoulder, and a variety of other tattoos on her neck, other arm, etc. Her hair was bleach blonde, braided into cornrows. Quiet, when we first met her the only conversation we had was from her terse responses to our questions. The bathrooms were also amazing. The girls' bathroom was wallpapered with cutouts from Playgirl and the like, with a sign, "please do not take the posters...they are for all to enjoy". Seager said that the boys' bathroom was decorated in a similar vein. In the background, behind the bar, was playing Judge Judy and then some home decorating show. Diane watched it most of the afternoon when she wasn't serving people. For dinner, we feasted on chili and grilled cheese and Rocky Mountain Oysters, i.e. sliced bull testicles battered, fried, and served with ranch dressing. They were kind of tasty, especially since fried, a little rubbery, but Ariel and I couldn't work up an appetite for them since we couldn't forget where they had come from. As the evening wore on it didn't get much cooler, so we hung out inside, writing in our journals and writing postcards. Eventually we got a few more customers, a foursome from Iowa on motorcycles and various other characters, and finally a cowgirl named MaryJo and a truck driver with an African Grey parrot with a 2,000 word vocabulary. The parrot gave us three girls a kiss goodnight and sat on our shoulder. Seager showed up with John around 8pm as the sun was setting. John hung out with us for awhile before leaving. We set up tents since the mosquitoes were so bad, and planned to get out early in the morning.

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