June 30 Winnett Day 30 53 miles

What a contrast from the past two days! Tailwind! The road climbed seriously out of Lewistown for 750 feet (by the way, I want you to visualize climbing a 75-story stairway dragging a hundred pounds of stuff behind you) and then leveled off to a gentle steady grade. We averaged over fourteen mph.

Winnett is the seat of Petroleum County - population 130. Every one of those people seemed to be perfectly prepared to spend the rest of the afternoon chatting with us. We met the school superintendent. A neighbor let us use her telephone (cell phone? We get cell phone coverage once in a while) to call for a hotel reservation in Jordan. Other neighbors invited us to take a beer or two on their porch. Check out Winnett on GoogleEarth (I'd add a picture but the Jordan Public Library is a little cautious of people attaching gadgets into their computers). The Kozy Korner cafe is the building on the corner of the two paved streets. A plywood sign hangs from a chain over the door. Mom runs the place, bakes the pies. Her daughter tends bar when she doesn't have to be out haying. The waitress graduated from high school, class of 05 (that's the number in the graduating class, not the year). If you want to know more about the place, you could look it up in Gourmet magazine, November, 2005. People call ahead to reserve a slice of any of twenty kinds of pie because, once they're gone, they're gone until Mom bakes some more. She has shipped pies as far as Wisconsin for people who couldn't go without. The waitress will attend college in Missoula in the Fall.
Our neighbors at the motel turned out to be a guy and his stepson. They drove God-knows-how-many hours from LA to be here for the Fourth because they had an invitation to shoot prairie dogs. They hope to kill as many as 300 each on the day. 'Course that's not much - the record is 800 for a day. I wish the prairie dogs luck.