Now what???

We woke up to dense fog this morning. Now, that should be easy & familiar to someone from Sausalito, right? This was different. For one thing, all the roads are completely new to us. We have no idea until we get there if there will be shoulders, or if shoulders we see will continue. We know nothing about traffic patterns. We do know that the only light on these roads comes from the sun, and that if we couldn't see cars, they couldn't see us. They are very considerate, usually, but they move pretty fast. Another difference, the fog was warm. Very weird for a westerner.

We had aimed for an early start to minimize the heat exposure. Oh, well. We went back to our room to read for a while. After about an hour we decided we could see the cars far enough away to make it safe & we headed out. In a minute or two, the cars disappeared again. Oh, they could see us just fine. But the fog was so dense that it left tiny droplets on my glasses and I couldn't see much. Bruce did the laser eye thing; he just took his glasses off. I pushed mine down so I could look over them. My vision isn't all that bad. I stopped to dry the glasses off every couple of miles. After a couple of hours, they stopped misting over. Phew.

The nice thing was that the fog really shielded us from the serious heat we feel when the sky is blue. We rode to our first little stop without feeling any major heat. On the other hand, that humidity! I can only assume that tropical jungles must be sort of like, uh, sort of like North Dakota? Well, maybe not quite. But it felt like the bathroom does if it's a small room and you have just stepped out of a long, hot shower.

After our first stop we found the headwinds again. The next several miles were slooow. We finished those miles in Lisbon (ND, not Portugal) where we had a late lunch/early dinner. The lady at tonight's motel had suggested it. The cafe had a fire last week so we'd only have a bar to eat at here. After we ate, we made a 90 degree turn and got blown along for the next 13 miles. That was fun. There was another spot where the road headed almost through a lake. Not, I assume from the trees that poked up all over, a lake we would see every year. Anyway, with all the wind & weather challenges, I hadn't stopped to look around much, and there was a big bird in one of the leafless trees. It was a bald eagle, well worth stopping for. On a nearby tree there were all sorts of cormorants' nests. I had no idea they nested in trees and built nests of grassy stuff. All the ones I see at home seem to content themselves with flat bits of cold offshore rocks.

We reached Enderlin. Fargo tomorrow if none of the ominous weather we're threatened with happens. I am beginning to read these forecasts sort of the way I read the Prop 65 signs at home. Tornado watches, severe thunderstorms, extreme heat (well, yeah, that one is sure happening), flooding. Poor Fargo has every one of those on today's list. I bet we ride there anyway.

Miles today: 72
Total miles so far: 1960