Yet another setback

My recreated map

To give: JON'S MDA DRIVE


Somehow in the last 24 hours I lost my North Dakota map, the dumbest thing I've done since I left my wallet behind back in Augusta, Montana, forcing Terri, the manager, to drive it out to me.

I called the places I'd stopped in yesterday, including a bike store where I got sealant ("slime" they call it) put in my front tube (my back tube already had it). But the bike store didn't have the map, as did nobody else. It's likely that I took it out when I stopped to sit in the shade and just lost track of it.

In between catnaps of depression, I went and bought a state highway map, which was helpful but missing many of the roads I wanted.  So I downloaded an Adventure Cycling digital map, which was pretty good, but didn't actually name the roads I wanted, just showed me where they were.

So I called them. I got a cartographer, Nathan, on the phone, and he sympathized with the digital map's shortcomings, and actually scanned and sent me the very map I'd lost. I could print it out if I could find a store like Staples or Office Max in this netherland of highways, but it seemed too much risk and too much work. So I transposed salient details onto my highway map, and between that and the phone app, I hope to be OK.

It cost me a day -- I won't leave till tomorrow. My sense of purpose has lost momentum, and the day has dragged and dragged. Because I'm cheap, I spent a couple hours looking at a thrift store and Kmart (yes, Kmart exists out here) for some way to pad my sore derriere, instead of paying three figures for a proper set of riding shorts to replace my flattened old pair. Here's what I wound up with:

I'm pretty sure the Attends are aimed at women, but a sore butt is a sore butt.

A little over two hundred miles to Fargo, and Fargo to me sounds like paradise.