Day 23: Dubois!

We woke up this morning and had to be out of the Cushman’s ranch really early. We all attempted to pack out things the night before to speed the process. Today we headed towards Dubois, Wyoming. This marked the fourth state along the way to Washington, D.C. Technically, we’ve already been in Wyoming since we crossed into Yellowstone National Park the other day, but since we didn’t see the sign saying “Welcome to Wyoming,” I’m not counting it. 

We left the ranch later than we anticipated and made our way towards Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We had a sponsored breakfast there and we were also meeting some local riders that were going to join us for the first couple of miles on our route. Our breakfast was a buffet style and was really delicious. It mostly consisted of typical breakfast foods like French toast, pancakes, sausage, biscuits, fruits, bacon, etc. Once we finished we went to the town square and it was a little more than different. They had four archways at the corners of the square and they were all made of antlers! That was when I could tell that I was in the wrong place and that I had been there far too long.

Once we set out of town everything fell into order and we were able to go pretty smoothly until we broke for lunch. Turns out there was a ton of construction going on up the mountain we had to climb so we racked the cyclists and took them over manually instead of allowing them to ride their bikes. Racking the cyclists usually takes a long time. When we tell the cyclists to rack their bikes three of them have to put them on the back of the van and four of the cyclists have to take their wheels off and place them on the top of the vans on the bike racks.

Once the construction had finished we dropped them off and went to our spots about ten miles apart. There was a pretty big downhill for the cyclists to enjoy and they also caught some pretty good tailwinds which made their trip a little quicker. Scott and I were the last van to mark a spot before they all would arrive at lodging so we were the sweeps. That generally means we stay behind the last pace line and follow them. There are always designated sweeps who wear special jerseys to signify to us so we can keep track of all the cyclists.

We ended up missing the turn into lodging so we had to double back and figure out how to get there. Once we got inside we had our weekly team meeting which is just a chance for us to get together as a team and discuss things we liked during the week and areas where we could use some improvement. We also passed along our awards again and Scott got the G award for always attempting to keep morale high at our crew stops so that was pretty cool.

We’re staying at Dubois High School in the gymnasium and our dinner is being sponsored by the National Cattlewomen’s Association. We’ve all heard some pretty good things about them so we’re excited for dinner to roll around. The gym is also set up for volleyball so I’m sure we’ll be playing that tonight after dinner.