we biked 72 miles today and we are back in the cell and internet world. We are at Ennis, Montana which is very famous for amazing fly fishing in the Madison River. Hope you enjoy just a few of the pictures that I took. I will write some more later this evening.

Tomorrow morning we will leave at 6 am and we will camp in a primitive campground, which means pit toilets, no showers, no cell service, no internet, and no running water, cool, I like it. That will probably be the case for the next 5 days so I am throwing in this extra blog just for fun. My next blog will have lots of geyser, mud pit, and boiling pool pictures with maybe some buffalo, bear and elk pictures as well.

I had a few problems today with reserving camp sights. I got the impression somewhere, somehow a month ago that all the Yellowstone camp sights were non-reservation, first come, first serve basis, and then today as I was investigating camp sights I saw that you can reserve them. As I began doing that I found that they were all full except one, so I reserved 3 nights in a row at one camp sight. So that means that the day after tomorrow will be a 105 mile day and then the next day we will ride probably ride around 50 miles as we tour the geysers and stuff. Then the 14th of June we will leave and bike 125 miles to our next camp sight. Wow, that will be an accomplishment if we pull it off. We have the RV as backup so we really haven’t decided for sure how we are going to work that. Might be exciting to set a new personal best on daily miles, and then again it might not😀

This is a rest day for us, and I am enjoying sitting in my lawn chair all day reading sports news, planning the rest of the trip, planning next years trip, drinking lots of coffee, and taking two or three naps. We usually take rest days on Sunday so we can go to church, but tomorrow and the next 5 days we will be at primitive campgrounds, near no towns with churches, the kind with a pit toilet, a central water source and nothing else, so we stayed here so we could get all the cloths washed.

Wow, it doesn’t seem like 40 days have gone by already on this bicycle trip, seems like I have just now gotten into shape. 21 days left until we are home again, 2 rest days and 19 ride days, with 4 days being 82 miles long each day, and the rest less with only 2 days being hard climb days, like the last week has been, which means we are now on the easiest 1/3 of the trip😀 We also are on the most scenic part of the trip, with Yellowstone, mountains, trees, rivers, and lakes as part of the scenery we will be riding through.

I am not sure when zippers were invented, but it was before I was born I am sure, and in all those years hardly any improvement has been done. You would think that with rocket ships, cell phones, computers etc that someone could invent a zipper that works. I have two zippers on my tent, and they both now come apart in the middle after they have been zipped up leaving a gaping hole where there should be none. One on the rain fly which means that if we get into a rain storm at night, it will let a ton of water inside my tent. The second is the screen on the inside wall of the tent which means mosquito’s have a free pass into the inside of my tent at night while I am sleeping, and a free pass to bite me and suck all my blood out at night. And then there is the zipper on my sleeping bag that zips up fine, but in the middle of the night when you want to get out to go to the bathroom it gets stuck, and you are locked into your sleeping bag until you die, but I am not grumbling, I like sleeping in a soaking wet sleeping bag, and I really like waking up with thousands of mosquito bites all over my body, in fact it is one of my favorite things😂😫😩😬

we rode 92 miles today, leaving camp at 6 am and pulling into this camp at Boulder, Wyoming at 4:30pm, so I was really out of gas. But with a shower and a “Mountain House” freeze dried dinner it didn’t take long until I was feeling good again. We saw lots of antelope along the way today. It reminded me of when the kids were young and we drove through Wyoming, and they would have a contest on who could see the most antelope. We can now see the Teton Mountains clearly so it really adds to the beauty of what we see as we ride. This picture is me with my IPad watching the final game of the NBA playoff’s. Often the campgrounds don’t have a strong enough WiFi to do this, but this Campground did as long as I sat in my lawn chair close to the office. Watching the game was a great way to end a long, hard day on a bicycle seat. I am bundled up in the sweats more to keep the mosquitos off than to stay warm. I had my first dog encounter today. He came running out, and ran around me and my bike several times barking his head off, I yelled at him with my loudest, meanest sounding voice, but I think what worked is I just picked up my speed considerably and he couldn’t keep up with me, wimpy dog!

I felt really good and strong today riding my bicycle. Taking yesterday off and resting was a good idea for me. It was a great,day of bicycling, the scenery was awesome, there was very little traffic often with no vehicles passing us for 15 minutes, and we saw lots of wildlife which always gets me excited. We left Utah and crossed into Wyoming today and almost immediately upon crossing the State line we started seeing antelope and elk, Wyoming is a great State for wildlife and hunting. We rode 65 miles today, the first 32 miles was all uphill, steep uphill, up to 14% grade. The second 32 miles was all down hill, nice downhill where you cruised along at 20 to 25 mph with little to no peddling. The first 32 miles took us 7 hours, and the second 32 miles took us 90 minutes. When we pulled into the KOA campground in Rock Springs I was ready for the swimming pool that they had, it only took me about 15 minutes to be in the pool cooling off. Tomorrow is a 92 mile day but there is much less hill climbing then the last 5 ride days have had, the steepest climb is just 4.8% grade. We probably will finish the day in less time than it took to ride 65 miles today.

A major part of the definition of wisdom is balance. Almost every truth or principle that exists is in tension with what appears to be an opposite truth or principle. Most people usually swing to one truth or the other, living their lives out of balance. I just wrote about the balance of getting strength from God and also by resting. There is also a very important balance to be achieved in the discipline of resting. I was born lazy and so were you. Our flesh is powerfully drawn to easy and comfortable. We can become way over balanced and become very lazy and hardly ever accomplish anything worthwhile in the name of or in the guise of resting. Early in this trip I took a day off, like I did this morning, but later came to the conclusion that it was a wrong choice and that I was a wimp for not riding that day because I was motivated by “easy and comfort”, but I think the choice this morning is right. The decision a month ago was made quickly without much thought, and it was made because I didn’t want to get out of bed that morning. The decision this morning to not ride was made last night, after thinking about it for some time realizing that I was truly tired and run out of gas and that I needed to get some extra rest. This is an important “balancing act” to get figured out otherwise we won’t accomplish much because we are either to lazy or to tired.