This morning the group woke up early to start our 4th day in North Dakota. Packing up was a little longer than usual but we were all on the road by 6:30. We had heard the night before that today we would have some strong headwinds, but no one was ready for what I thought was one of the hardest days so far on the trip. The first stretch of our ride was mostly flat but that quickly ended once we got on the highway. The winds were soul crushing. It felt like we were putting effort worthy of 18 mile per hour speeds, but no matter how hard we tried we could barely reach 10mph. The original plan for the day was an 89 mile day but that as quickly dropped to a much more reasonable 65.
Breakfast was 25 miles into our day, and for me it was the hardest 25 of the trip. Our gas station breakfast was surprisingly good, and some of us even manged to squeeze in a quick nap before we headed out for the slightly easier rest of our day. The winds divided our usual 2 groups into smaller groups of 3. Group 1 mostly stuck to the highway while the other 2 groups stuck to country roads that ran parallel to the highway.
We took a very long lunch break in the town Dickinson. The only option for food in town was a gas station and an Arby's, so naturally no one went to the Arby's, and we all enjoyed our second gas station meal of the day.
Finally, we arrived in Belfield and set up camp at a tiny local park. We quickly realized that there was no where to shower or charge our phones so we headed to a local bar and spent the remainder of the day just loitering and playing pool until we could fall asleep. Tomorrow we are supposed to finally have the wind on our side and we'll hopefully be able to knock out a quick 80 miles with no trouble.