Longest Ride, Biggest Thrill (Whoopee)

This morning, we set off early from Napoleon, North Dakota. Not too early to get a delicious breakfast prepared by our hostess, Marge Horner, but early enough to beat some of the morning heat. Good thing, because we had a looooong ride ahead of us.

The first half of the ride (that is, the first 56 miles of the ride) were through some gorgeous countryside. Although the light is not very amenable to taking photos with the camera pointed eastward at 8:00 in the morning, perhaps the following hilltop photo will give you an idea of the countryside we were heading into.

Yesterday, Pat stopped the car at an intersection for one of our water breaks, and she asked whether anyone could figure out why she stopped there. Jonathan was the only one who guessed right ... it was the first time the road had turned a corner in 15 miles. But if she had just waited, today's ride had a stretch of nearly 75 miles where we could have used laser steering, because there was no cornering, no steering involved. Just slight up and down hills, and by the time we arrived in Enderlin, 113 miles after we started, it was 4:00 in the afternoon, even though we had averaged 16 mph for the entire ride.

What did we see on the way? Here's a picture that Pat took from the support vehicle and sent to a geologist friend, who assures us that this is a "pothole" lake, formed during the ice age when an iceberg had settled in and slowly melted as the receding waters deposited soil around it.

It has the look of a water color painting.

But there is one thing missing from the picture, something that I got to see close up as I zoomed by on my bicycle. At the time, I was going about 30 mph at the bottom of a big hill, and was watching a pair of cormorants who were looking for fish in the pond. As I watched, there emerged from the reeds beside me six whooping cranes! They flew from the reeds, spread their wings, and skimmed the water to the safety of the middle of the pond, where they splashed down. Of course at the speed I was going, I didn't have access to my camera, but the following picture from Wikimedia shows exactly what they looked like.

The snowy white feathers, the black wing tips, and the yellowish beak were very distinctive and decidedly different from sandhill cranes, which I've seen before. Not quite as near to me as the bison the other morning, but I let out a very loud "Wowee" as I went by, enjoying the rare sighting. I thought I had seen a small group of cranes across another pond a few miles earlier, but nothing like seeing six of them take flight, glide, and land in the water. The whooping crane was near extinction just a few years ago, so it was distinct thrill and privilege to see them taking flight in the wild like this.

So I will end tonight's blog with wishes for a sweet dreams, dreams populated by a thousand cranes of peace. Meanwhile, I'll be trying to get a good night's sleep to recover from what should be the longest ride of our trip, according to the schedule.