Day 14, Rest day in Billings

BEST: Going to see the movie Prometheus and sitting in an air conditioned area

WORST: Heat was in the upper 90's with no air conditioning in our room

MOST UNEXPECTED: Paying $$$ for a new saddle



No pictures today except for the largest cinnamon roll I have ever seen. We ate at Stella's Cafe which is supposedly the best Breakfast joint in Billings. This time we biked down to the downtown learning from yesterday that walking took a long time to get there.

I unloaded 10 lbs of gear to Fedex to ship home making it easier for me to pack. If they had any trees to pitch a hammock in this country, I would have kept it, but football fields and grassy areas outside of facilities made the hammock superflous. It is no fun to lay out the hammock on the ground and get in it.

Bike cleaning was another exciting element of my day, and now the family initialed bike is squeaky clean.

Several of us went to a bike store today, and my primary focus was to get a new bike saddle. Also they were having a sale on their Montana jerseys and 1/2 off. First, they had only size small jerseys, and second, they had nobody working the sales floor who could help me with saddle selection. When I say nobody working, I don't mean a knowledgable salesman, I mean the only people in the store were the cashier, and the shop guys who didn't know anything about bike parts.

I picked a saddle based on my measurements of my sitbones, and you don't want to know how I measured the distance between the bones. Nobody volunteered to help me. After the bike store, we went to the movies and saw Prometheus which made eating afterwards somewhat problematic. We went to a sushi/Japanese restaurant and I made sure to avoid the octopus (think Alien). I had a brief moment of panic when I went to pay and my wallet was missing, but it had been left in the car, so all was well. I guess I could have pretended not to find it and somebody would have paid for my meal. As an aside, we did have a rider lose their wallet a couple of days ago. Bummer.

Back to the dorm by 8:15 to put my saddle on the bike, and then upstairs to write this scintillating tale. I did a good job of resting today.