Moving at a glacial pace (for once!)

Greetings from Glacier National Park! We rode here in 3 days from Missoula, MT, arriving on Sat 7/11, and have been relaxing by Lake McDonald with our books ever since. My current addiction is the Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery series by Charlaine Harris. Thanks to a bookshop in Missoula and the bulging bookbag that Doug's parents brought with them to Glacier, I have 8 (!) of the Sookie novels, and have plowed through 5 of them in the last week. I'm determined to finish the remaining 3 before we start riding again. OK, you might say I am a wee bit obsessed. But binge-reading has always been one of my favorite vacation pleasures, and there's no better place for binge reading than the shore of Lake McDonald! It is so lovely to sit around on a lakeside bench all day instead of pedalling. If I'm feeling particularly energetic, I go skip rocks for awhile and wade in the water before returning to reading. It's a good life.

We've had a mix of rain and sunshine in Glacier so far, and I'm hoping we'll get a bit more sun before we leave so we can go river rafting. Today the four of us drove up the Going-to-the-Sun Road to Logan Pass (elevation 6646 feet, part of the Continental Divide). At the top, we took a walk up a mountain along a raised wooden path that was covered by snow in certain parts! It was pretty awesome; I promise we'll add some photos later when we get a chance to upload!

We've adapted the next leg of our trip somewhat, and are planning to ride straight across the prairies of Montana and North Dakota to get to Minnesota, instead of dropping down through Yellowstone, Wyoming, and South Dakota. We've heard mixed reviews about the prairie ride (one rider told us about some funky wind patterns he hit a few years ago), but we're particularly psyched by its flatness. I looked for an elevation scale on our Adventure Cycling maps, only to realize that the next leg of our trip doesn't have an elevation map because, well, it's that damn flat! Sweet. If the winds can stay at our backs, we should have a nice (albeit looong) next stretch ahead of us.