It ain't heavy, it's my bike: Glacier National Park, Day 1

Oh, she so happy to not be riding on a train anymore!

We boarded the Amtrak in St. Paul on Friday night at 10:50 p.m. or so (the train was 30-40 minutes late arriving). Our car was nearly empty, the seats could recline almost all the way, and we were ready to crash. We slept until Minot, North Dakota, sometime around 8 a.m. on Saturday morning. The landscape was almost totally flat until we got within about 20 miles of the East Glacier Park stop were we got off the train. Here's a quick time-lapse summary of what it looked like:

We saw two ghost towns in Montana where buildings still stood, but there were no windows in the buildings and no occupants.

Oh so scenic.

The train was very nice; our car was maybe 10% filled, so we had plenty of room to spread out. We had breakfast in the dining car, seated across the booth from a young Amish couple (there were a lot of Amish people on the train). This couple had just gotten married in Michigan (where she was from) and were moving to Montana (where he'd lived for the last 10 years). His family ran a sawmill, and he worked there. We had a lot of questions, but tried not to pry too much.

The couple two rows behind us also got on at MSP and were extremely loud the whole trip, playing music from their phone, talking loudly on the phone, and talking to each other. They broke up somewhere in eastern Montana, and he said the only thing that was keeping her safe was that he just got out after 8 years in prison and he didn't want to go back. So that was cool.

Please note extremely friendly stray (or maybe just wide-ranging outdoor) dog in foreground.

We made it to East Glacier by 7:15 p.m. on Saturday and Reed and Nathan rolled up just as we were leaving the station. We checked into the Circle R Motel and Nathan and Reed went back to look for hitchhikers that they'd passed somewhere near Browning, MT. They were either eaten by a bear or got another ride, because they were nowhere to be found. There was a dead cow by the bridge as they entered town and a mama bear and her cubs nearby. We went to dinner at Serrano's, which was just around the corner from the hotel, and then watch the Rolling Stones in Cuba on cable (the Stones looked just as leathery as ever).