“Rest Day means Rest”, Jeff keeps telling us. We tried hard to keep him happy today. We had no Internet access here at the dorms of the Rock Mountain College, so Scott and I had to go searching. We found a downtown restaurant, MacCormicks, which assured us they had a great Sunday brunch as well as WiFi access. We took an ancient taxi to the restaurant; relieved that it was still running when we got there. After ordering the brunch, and settling in with our computers, we found that we had access to their network, but no the Internet. This was the only open Internet café in town that we knew of, so in desperation we put our minds together, checked out their only running computer, and managed to figure out how to slip into their network. Many emails, and uploads to the websites followed.
From there, we walked to the movie theater to meet the rest of the crowd, but found we had walked to the wrong theater. We called the cab company again and waited 15 minutes for an even more ancient hack, this one driven by a nice man wearing an oxygen tube into his nose. By the time he dropped off his other fare, and we wheezed over to the theater, the movie was well started.
This forced us to go shopping, so we picked up a few necessary items. On the way to the store, we came across a Billings crime scene. Someone had run a sod cutter over the grass of a business and stolen a bunch of grass. These big cities, they’ll try anything!
Another cab ride brought us back to the college just as the cabbie got a call to go pick up the 9 people who had gone to the movies. Somehow he was going to pack them all in his station wagon.
I think about our ancient cab and cabbie on oxygen and count my blessings for a healthy body and a hope for cleaner air. Riding the Big Ride, one hill at a time.

Alan is our mechanic and does a terrific job keeping our bikes on the road. He was even able to get Lucija on the road when her derailleur got tangled up with her spokes. Here, he's checking out the spokes on Jennifers bike to see if they need adjusting.