Havre, Montana - I've never been here before, but Havre holds special significance to me.

About six years ago, when I first began looking for jobs in the newspaper biz, I applied to the Havre Daily News, and as I recall they offered me a job. I blanched, both because of the location - middle-of-nowhere central Montana - and the pay, which was infinitesimal. A couple of months (and a string of rejections) thereafter, I took a job with the Roswell Daily Record, in the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico, for about the same pay. As it turned out, I hated Roswell: the landscape was featureless in all directions, the town had no character, and the paper was pretty awful. I left after eight months.

So as I've spent the morning tooling around Havre, I've constantly asked myself how this would have compared. And as far as I can tell Havre is in a dead heat with Roswell. Not that it isn't a nice place to visit for a morning, but it's a largely ugly industrial town tucked away in the middle of a featureless landscape that stretches to eternity. It has an unsightly strip along the highway running through town, a pretty (if pretty small) downtown and a few pleasant, leafy neighborhoods off the main drags. And that's it. Also, the paper looks to be about the same dubious quality as the Daily Record. Looking around, I'd have to call it a wash, though Roswell may win out because a.) the winter weather is undoubtedly much nicer there, and b.) it had cheap and ubiquitous Mexican food. So I can cut off that lingering thread of my existence.

Havre marks my third day zooming through the high emptiness of southern Alberta and central Montana. The road is straight and mostly flat, and the scenery consists of neverending fields and range, the monotony broken up only by the occasional silo dotting the horizon or a Burlington Northern train chugging by on your flank. The towns here are all weird little constructs: clusters of homes, trees and wheat towers rising out of the grass, usually crammed into the narrow stripy between the road and the railroad tracks.

I shouldn't say I've been 'zooming,' however, because it's actually been a two-day battle against an ugly headwind to get anywhere.

For a long-distance cyclist, there is nothing worse than a headwind. Hills are tough, sure, but you can see them coming, plan for them, and generally they reward you once you reach the top and get to scream down the other side.

Headwinds have none of these advantages. They can slow you down just as much as a hill, and can go on for much longer than any hill ever would, but you can't see them, can't prepare for them, and don't get anything on the other side except more road. They make you feel like the entire universe is conspiring to defeat you. Two straight days of them had me near despair.

The day before yesterday was especially awful. After spending a low-key day off in Cardston - and you haven't lived until you've seen the Museum of Miniatures, where some guy basically made a bunch of fairly cheesy dioramas in his rec room and charges people $6CN to see them - I had struggled against an ugly headwind for 23 miles when I blew a tire.

In theory, no problem. But either through my own incompetence or that of my tire pump (and probably a combination of the two), not only could I not replace the tire, but I managed to wreck both of my spares. So I was stuck on what was literally the least traveled road of my entire trip with no choice but to flag a ride back to Cardston, home of the only bike shop anywhere near me.

Fortunately, my luck was running the opposite direction of the wind; a guy in a pickup with room in the back for the bike came by inside of 5 minutes. Back in Cardston, the bike shop sold me some new tubes and a new pump (threw the old one out with gusto) and even let me put the tire on in their shop.

Then it was off again, to repeat the same 23 miles I had just done, into what had become an even stronger wind, and add on the 50 more it would take to get to the next town, where I proceeded to go to a fast-food joint and eat more at a single sitting than I had since high school.

Which brings us back to Havre. Mercifully, the wind shifted overnight and is now alternating between a crosswind and a tailwind; the difference in my speed (and mood) has been remarkable. I've only got another 40 miles to go today, my brother Marty is headed up from Colorado to meet me (I think) and presumably to do as much whooping up as one can do in Harlem, Montana (pop. 900.) Yee-haw!