Two tickets to Paradise

[Kellogg to Paradise, MT; 85 miles cycled]

“I’m gonna take you on a trip so far from heeeere…” If you have never greeted the morning with the Eddie Money classic “Two Tickets to Paradise” blaring, I’d recommend it. A bit out of it due to the early 5:00 am wakeup, it admittedly took me a few minutes to make the connection that our iPod wakeup mix was correlated to our day’s destination: Paradise, MT (“Gansters Paradise” and “Paradise City” also made welcome appearances). Much had been foretold of this route from past riders, including allegations that the day’s two mountain passes made for the toughest day of the trip (see our daily board – conditions: “ROuGH!!!”). With my confidence growing day to day, I was eager for the opportunity to get it over with and see what all those exclamation points were about.


I cranked up the first climb with relative ease and, despite a significantly more challenging second climb, had completed both of them before lunch. Both climbs resulted in intense downhill descents and so caution was advised. This ended up resulting in an unfortunate incident with my pace line, in which one of my fellow cyclists got too spaced out from the group and was “racked” for multiple days as a punishment. As it turned out, racking was in all of our future’s as the team hit a spell of thunder and lightning about 15 miles from lodging and had to pile in the vans as part of procedure. Despite the reprieve from exhaustion, being racked is never a good feeling for anyone and this was no exception.

Our lodging for the night was a hotel (!) that featured authentic hot springs that ranged in temperature from cold to hot. Even though its supposed to be a gradual process from one temperature extreme to another, I booked it straight for the “hot” hot spring. Yes the day had so challenges, but ending it lounging in a mountainside natural hot tub… not too shabby.