Madison --> Ennis MT (7/9/10)

We decided not to wake as early this morning, we wanted to chat with the folks from the night before and eat some breakfast, the camp attendants also brewed us some coffee so we took full advantage of the coffee.  After chatting and getting plenty of coffee we headed on to West Yellowstone, Montana.  The trip out of the park was about 14 miles, which was mostly flat and fairly light traffic.  About 4 miles into the ride my chain started to do a weird binding when I stopped pedaling, so I pulled of over and checked to see what was going on.  The first problem I could see was that there was no longer any freewheel, which is an extremely important component.  Freewheel lets you stop pedaling with out stopping the rear wheel or chain, when this fails (which is very rare) it will not stop the rear wheel but it will drop the chain off the crank.  So realizing that I had one option, don't stop pedaling, I headed on.  This becomes a challenge when in traffic or in a pace line.  Fortunately I lead the pace line (no choice) and there were no stoplights or heavy traffic.  After rolling into West Yellowstone we took pictures and then headed over to the bike shop to see if they could fix my issue.

At the shop, which was a great set up, coffee shop, cool clothing store and bike shop all in one.  The mechanic checked it out and said that in 14 years as a mechanic she had never seen a freewheel break all of the sudden.  The question I had was can she fix it, yes and no.  She can get me on the road again, but the fix is not with new parts nor will it be a lasting fix.  Getting to the next big town is the best option on these parts and she was almost certain that I would make it.  Sold. So after a used part and about an hour I was "fixed" but since the used freewheel was not a match to my old one it left me with a lot of wheel play in the rear.  We headed out and started towards Ennis, much much later than we had anticipated, but we were moving. 

Riding on we went by a huge lake resort area, which was a great place to take a short break for water and snacks.  Moving on from Hebgen Lake we rode into a headwind, which was not expected since we thought that we left the headwind in Wyoming.  Alas we rode into the wind, forming a peloton (the proper word for a pace line).  With the peloton we were about to keep our speed at about 17 mph, and finally cover some miles, since we had 80+ to do for the day.  As we got closer to the town of Ennis, about 19 miles out, I got my second flat tire.  Today was not my day with bicycles, but I replaced the tube and got rolling in about 20 minutes (Marathon Plus tires are a pain to get on and off).  As we rode the last 19 miles in we were missed by a thunderstorm, which was a change from Wyoming.

Getting into Ennis, Nick and I decided to rent a hotel room because the mossies were too thick, Robin and Zack stayed at the campground for the night.  The hotel room had to advantages, 1: a shower and 2: space to repack my bags to get the weight off the rear to help keep the wheel from moving around too much.  After some dinner and repacking it was bed time, we had planned an early morning for huge hill that was about 4 miles out of town.