Day 76, Darby to Missoula, Montana.

Antique wagon for sale in down town Darby.

Here's something every family could use. A portable jail for when the kids get out of hand,

How's this for starting off the New Year with a bang?

Barns are cool. The older, the better.

Mr T's. an all purpose shopping place. You can get farm equipment, hunting and sporting goods, and a convenience store to boot.

The mountains from the bike path.

A mountain lake nestled in a meadow along the route.

I tried photographing the telephone pole, but the mountains got in the way.

This Rocky Mountain Big horn was made out of horse shoes.

There is a wild fire started from lightning that they can't get to, so they are monitoring it hoping it'll burn itself out.

One of the many farms that dot the country side.

There are ski slopes on the mountain to the right. If you click on the photo, you can see the different runs.

This fake Moose was for sale, but I didn't have any place to put um.

Down town Darby from outside our eatery.

The Darby Logging Days are held at that park across the street. We missed it by a week.

The mighty Clark river.

Our camp site at Darby with the Adventure Cycling group.

The side walk was jammed pack with all these stuff for sale.


Day 76, Darby to Missoula, Montana. “Easy Day For A Change”. 68.54 miles.

Sunday, July 26, 2009. So far we have traveled 3,558.19 miles on our bikes. We are in Missoula, Montana tonight., and will take a much needed rest day here tomorrow before pushing on into Idaho.

Darby is a pretty neat little town. it has that real western look to it. Christmas lights adorned the streets even though it was late July. I figured they just left them up cause it was just too much trouble going through the whole process again every year. We left our camp site at 8:30 this morning after a huge breakfast of biscuits and gravy with a side order of diced potatoes. The road today was fairly flat. It was by far one of the easiest days we’ve had in quite some time. We rode 25 miles in less than two hours. We were in lower altitude now. Under 4,000 feet. So the terrain returned once again to the dryer and wide open plains type surrounding. As we gradually made our way into the farm lands, things began to get greener. There were more alfalfa fields, and little communities along the way. Traffic was light, and the air temperature was in the mid 70’s. We were already in Stevensville by lunch time, and had already gone 40 miles. It felt great, knowing that the afternoon would be a fairly short one. We had another treat today. we got to ride on a bike path. Nearly 20 miles in all. The bike path was a wide one, at least 10 or 12 feet wide. And closed to all but bicycle and pedestrian traffic. We were able to ride with out the worry of getting runned over, or blown off the road by those huge logging trucks. It allowed us to pay less attention to the road, and more on the scenery.

Before we knew it, we had arrived at Missoula. This is quite a large town, over 50,000. So finding our way around wasn’t that easy. The map didn’t have the needed detail to guide us directly to our destination. But leave it to Lisa to figure these things out. And as usual, she was able to get us there without too much difficulty.

We are spending the night at the Belaire Motel. This was great. Large rooms, with plenty of space for our bikes and gear. And an Internet that works. Good night everybody, going to take it easy a bit, Ted.