Kindness of Strangers

Hello,
I'm in Minot, North Dakota. It's been a while since I've seen a library so
let me try to pick up where we left off.

Leaving Minneapolis we started to encounter really friendly people. Not
that other places didn't have friendly people, but EVERYONE out here is
friendly. Around 95% of drivers wave to us first while we are biking. No
joke. I have a few stories about how kind everyone has been to us. Outside
of Minneapolis one night we didn't have any place to stay - it turned out
the campground had closed, the motel was booked and the B&B was going to be
way out of our price range. I'll spare you the details, but we ended up
camping on the back porch of one of the town council members. The guy,
Brian, turned out to be completely interesting - he is a beekeeper, jewelry
maker (he even made melissa and me pendants while we were talking), and he
is a lighting/technician kind of guy for movies/tv. He showed us one video
of a show he worked on called Let's Bowl that aired on the Minneapolis cable
access channel - kind of funny in a really random bowling kind of way.
Anyway, today while we were watching tv (we're in a motel room - Yay!) we
saw a commercial for Let's Bowl on Comedy Central. We were very excited to
realize that Brian and his gang of comedic misfits finally made it onto the
national scene.

When we tell people out here that we are biking cross country starting in
Maine, most of them tell us that we are going the wrong way. Not b/c we are
lost, but because we are traveling against the prevailing winds. For the
first half of the trip we could laugh them off, because we luckily did not
face any kind of headwind. Well, that all has changed. Thankfully, the
heat wave has ended but the wind has really picked up. We asked three
different people if westerly winds meant coming from or going to the west
since we kept hearing on the radio that we would have westerly winds for the
upcoming days. Unfortunately all of them agreed that westerly winds means
coming from the west which produces a brutal headwind for us. One day last
week we realized that there was just no way that we would make the town with
the campground at the 6mph at which we were traveling. So, we finally hit a
town whose only service was a restaurant. We walked in and asked if she
knew of any place for us to camp. She offered the backyard of the
restaurant and we almost started crying it was such a relief. The
restaurant was actually in a old one room red school house that was built in
the 1880's. Gail was a fantastic hostess, dinner was wonderful and her free
breakfast the next morning of eggs, toast and homemade freezer jam couldn't
be beat.

Campgrounds have been charging us much less out here than they did back east
which was around $20. All of them have asked either $5 total or given us
the site for free. One woman kept the kitchen open for us so that we
wouldn't have to cook our own dinner and then when we were leaving came out
and gave us a freshly cut cucumber in a ziploc baggie. Now back in your
world, a small bag of cucumber might not be that big of a deal, but for us
who hadn't seen fresh produce in many days, it was an amazing gesture. That
night we camped on a bluff about 70 feet above the mississippi River. It
was breathtaking and really surprising how many stars can be seen when there
aren't any city lights interfering.

I'm going to end this now, because i don't know when i'm going to be kicked
off this computer. Hope everyone is doing well.
cheers,
leigh