Day 5 - Minot, ND to Malta, MT

My preference on trips is to stay at the mom and pop places along the way. I believe it serves a number of purposes: 1) it helps small businesses stay in the business; 2) it gives me an opportunity to experience some unique places; 3) they generally have parking spaces accessible from you room door; and 4) they are generally cheaper than one of those chain hotels. Of course, one of the down sides of doing that is that most of the mom and pops do not provide you with a breakfast option (continental or otherwise). The place we stayed at last night – the Sierra Inn – can’t really be considered as a mom and pop, but it is also not a chain, but it did come with a continental breakfast, which we took advantage of!

After breakfast, we drove into the city of Minot and visited the Scandinavian Heritage Centre, where they honour such people as Leif Erikssen, Hans Christian Andersen and many more. With the sun shining upon us, and although it was still a coolish start (around 12 C), we hopped back on to US2 and continued our trek westward.

After fueling up in Stanley - the Pinnacle Truck Stop there sells everything but the kitchen sink! – we continued on to Williston to go check out a fairly new dealership at Black Magic HD. Earlier in the morning, I had heard from Brian Fries – a long time facebook friend from my VentureRider days who now rides a Road Glide – and he commented that he might me taking advantage of the good weather and riding out to meet us at Black Magic.

We checked out the shop, went for an early lunch just up the road at Fuddrucker’s and then came back to see if Brian had made it and sure enough he had. After a much too quick visit, we said our

goodbyes and look forward to seeing him again when we come through Regina on the return leg of the trip.

So, back onto US2 we went and we continued the ride through the mixture of gently rolling hills and flatlands, with lots and lots of farms, derricks and drills along the way. With the warmer temperatures and the easy going terrain, it made for a nice ride. There are a few spots along US2 where major road construction is taking place, so that meant doing some careful riding on uneven, loose gravel and bumpy pavement, but we managed to navigate it just fine.

Once we stopped in Pine Wolf for fuel, we could see some darker rain clouds off to our left, and by the time we made a quick pit stop at a rest area about 40 kms from our destination, we decided it was time to boogie on. I debated putting on the rain gear at Saco, but we thought we’d just continue on. As it turned out, we did get a few

sprinkles and a couple of minutes of the heavier stuff, but we were dry by the time we got to our destination at the Maltana Motel in Malta, MT.

Dinner was a block away at the Great Northern Lounge and Steakhouse – with complimentary tickets for free drinks from our motel too!

In the end, our route was exactly the same as what we had planned and we went just under 570 kms for the day, bringing the total for the trip to 3,114 kms.