Resting in Dillon, MT; the Group from Palm Desert, California

I am glad to have a chance today to be relaxing, and spending time at the library cleaning up the blog and catching up on email correspondence.

The blog got somewhat confused in the last few days, due to limited AT&T access. At one point, in Wisdom, I found out that the restaurant had Wi-Fi, but as I was posting I lost the Wi-Fi service because the electricity was cut off for the whole region. I wasn't clear on what had been posted and what hadn't been, and as a consequence some things were posted twice. But I think I have now gotten that all cleaned up.

I made a bunch of minor corrections to some of the blogs from the last week....mainly dates, typos, etc. Nothing of consequence changed, but I do apologize to Caitlin, the 11-year old who is bicycling to Massachusets with her sister and parents, for having accidentally spelled her name "Cairlin."

In a prior post I mentioned that Craig and Doug transported my baggage yesterday. We are all camping at the same place in Dillon, and they invited me to have dinner with them last evening. The kids are responsible for doing all the cooking. Last evening two of the boys had "kitchen duty," and they cooked hamburgers, with roasted potatos and corn. It was a nice ending to a beautiful day.

Craig, a humanities teacher at a middle-school in Palm Desert, California, started a non-profit group called Historic Youth Tours. He and Doug and 11 kids drove from Southern California to Montana, where they are taking a bicycling tour for about a week, including visits to historic sites and capped by a raft trip. Including the drive, I think this is about a two-week excursion for them.

Craig is an avid bicyclist and recruited his friend Doug, president of the Palm Desert Bicycling Club, to join him on this year's trip. Of the eleven kids, two are 14 year-old girls (Clarissa and Margaret, both of whom I enjoyed talking with last evening) and nine boys aged 12 and 13. Their equipment includes: a passenger van that holds the whole gang; a trailer, outfitted by Craig to hold all the bicycles and luggage; two ten-person tents, one for the boys and one for the girls (the two girls on this trip have plenty of space!); and small tents for each of the adults. The organization also owns several bicycles that are used by kids who did have have bicycles appropriate for this trip.

I haven't had the pleasure of riding with the group, because they have started off in the morning before me. But even if I had started with them, I doubt that I could have kept up. In order to be permitted to join the group the kids had to train for several months, with lots of hill work, so they are in great shape! And of course both Craig and Doug are avid bicyclists. (Doug, incidentally, has a Co-Motion bicycle that is almost identical to mine -- other than mine, his is the only other one that I have seen.)

The kids have all been well-behaved and friendly, and seem to be enjoying the trip very much. I am sure that they don't yet appreciate how lucky they are to have had Craig start this organization, and to have Doug volunteer his time to help with this trip. But as the years go by they undoubtedly will -- ten, twenty, sixty years from now they will be talking about the great time that they had on this trip, and they will remember Craig and Doug.

I intend to post a photo of this group when I am able to.

And I have already asked them to transport my baggage one more day, tomorrow, from here to Whitehall, at which point we will be going in different directions.