Here’s Noah in the bike store as he’s staying and we’re leaving.
And Sarita checks out the map trying to figure out how to get out of Boise going East without having to do it on an interstate.
There was no way out but the interstate which was 40 miles. We started at 4:00 and got to Mountain Home at 6:30. We were flying in intense heat with no shade or shadows except our own..
The ride from Weiser to Boise was mostly a flat 80 miles through beautiful farmland.
It’s like Idaho figured out what to do with all that river water running through.
We got a great camp site next to a river and did a gigantic load of laundry. We repacked everything so Noah could leave and now my load is super heavy I guess cuz of the tent and seven innertubes.
The lady in the camp site next to us is from Nevada. She is camping here while she has radiation at the hospital in Boise where her husband thinks the best neuroscience is. She looks at the river and is dressed in interesting colorful clothes. She gave us each two water bottles for our ride.
All along the way we have met with enormous well wishing and kindness from strangers.
We are in a radically cool cafe now in Boise which is a surprisingly hip city
Complete with hot pink diners and art on utility boxes better than Berkeley’s
(soory I don’t have photos of any of that but I passed these while in intense city traffic and couldn’t do the drive by photo thing safely).
This cafe we are in is so cool that they have uncooked pasta for coffee stirrers. It gets better: They are non profit here with fantastic food and sophisticated coffee drinks. Say what? The workers are volunteers and all the profit goes to “chapel missions” in India.
The radio station playing is great and the guy who serves us our food has a seven inch tattoo on the inside of his forearm that sort of looks like a dagger and sort of looks like a cross. Goes both ways I guess.
The guys in the bike store here are especially nice. nick is especially nice and is boxing Noah’s bike for $35.00 and taking him to the airport for free.
In the Bay Area, they’ll box your bike for a hundred and go figure how you are going to get it to the airport
Noah, in his persistence to go home, figured out that we were close to Boise Idaho and that it had an airport.
We found a flight for $80 from Boise to Oakland, so we booked it and went to sleep after buying state maps from a truck stop.
In the middle of the night it started to rain so I jumped out of the tent and put the fly cover thing on and got the bikes and all the packs and shoes under shelter and I was hard to wake up in the morning especially as it was still raining.
We had sent back a lot of stuff from the post office in Baker City to make us lighter on the hard climbs. Noah’s rain jacket was sent as he was only riding 2 more days and as Sa had checked the average rainfall and it didn’t seem we needed it. So I set out in the rain primarily to get a good cup of coffee and also to get a rain poncho (which unfortunately will act as a sail) for Noah. There was no place open to get him a rain jacket.
It took us a while to figure out a route. We didn’t want to do any interstate but we couldn’t make it to boise in time without it. So we finally started out around eleven on a course that involved ten miles of interstate in a seventy plus mile day.
The ride in general was easy as there were no mountains and we were on a frontage road with hardly any traffic and beautiful scenery which I am shooting with the phone from the bike.
We were scared to get on the interstate so we all wore yellow and had our flashing red rear lights on and took Bach’s “Rescue Remedy” drops but it wasn’t dangerous at all as the shoulder was huge. However it was unpleasant as the 18 wheelers were noisy.
Just as we were getting used to the interstate, Sarita had a flat!!
We fixed it easily!!
We carried on and Sa got a wasp caught in her shirt and it stung her several times!!! 😦 But she (as usual) was a hero! We contined on (on and on and on) miles upon miles and through a time change and into another state!
Basically, we just couldn’t do it. There’s no bus and no U Haul to rent , No nothing to Missoula
A brick wall one way or another
So he’s stuck with us riding through “halfway” and “Hells canyon” and places like that until we get to Misspula where there is an airport
In eastern Oregon, there are so few people and so much land, the silence is only broken by the sound of our wheels turning and the wind blowing through the trees. We were surprised to find that when we go under electric wires, they are making a buzzing sound. We thought maybe we were mistaken but it happened more than once.
We pass all kinds of roads with funny names like “Telephone Road” and “Screeech Alley Loop”
And lots of others I can’t remember. We were in for sure the middle of nowhere in the forested mountains when all of a sudden there was a brown (like National Park Service brown) that said “Social Security Point”. It seemed dangerously out of place like a camouflage for the KKK or something. I have heard that OR has the largest KKK membership but why? there are no African American people here, really.
We’ve passed through rattlesnake Creek and Murderers Creek and always there is a river running by our road. We are now by the Powder River and often go to sleep with the sound of a river running by. We are riding on back roads which is why we are hardly ever near a real town but today we are in a 9,000 person town and it feels gigantically awful and crass (although we are looking forward to the health food store and I am at a cafe where I am having the first real cup of coffee in a week).
We are hanging here as we are taking the bus to Missoula, Montana tomorrow because Noah wants to go home. It’s amazing to have some free time. When we are on the road we are doing everything as fast as we can. Taking down camp, packing, riding furious to get to our destination in daylight, then setting up camp. Now we are relaxing and it feels right. 
So we started out a little late 8:30ish after breakfast.
We were looking forward to what looked like a town called Austin junction after the first mountain. On the map it said it had a restaurant, a gas station, a post office and a grocery store. When we got to Austin junction it was the intersection of two streets with one store and since she was the only game in town it cost us $45.00 for three sandwiches and some power bars and cookies. Gas there was $4.90 a gallon. A. 44 cent stamp was 50 cents!
We had to eat so we had to pay.
The food lasted us over the next two mountains. It was a super hard day
After some 70 miles and three mountains we were beat as we pulled into baker city which has as many Christian churches as San Francisco has cafes and it was Sunday so Main street was closed.
We managed to find a fantastic RV campground with a beautiful granite bathroom and shower and a super clean laundry room. We set up tent and then went to the truck corral by the interstate for dinner. Super nice waitress. Awful food. Sorry there is so much emphasis on food in this but when you are exercising full on 12 hpurs a day there is a lot of focus on sustenance and how to get it
Noah is completely done, spent, exhausted and can’t go on. The next stretch to Missoula is way harder than what we have been doing.
Noah wants to go home. We are taking a day off in baker city to figure out a bus or something to Missoula do Noah can go home from there.
He has ridden a heroic week and his leg muscles show it
This is us this morning after breakfast in Prarie. The waitress at the diner who was neither young or old had a full restaurant at seven in the morning being the only place of its kind for miles and miles. Still, she came out and offered to take a photo of the three of us. That’s how nice people are out here. I’m attributing it to the spaciousness of it all.
Depending on who you talk to out here or what map or sign you believe
We did between 80 and 90 miles with two mountains yesterday
We were beat (Especially with the hail and all)
We had a nice rest in the Fish Ranch Inn with a cherry tree out our window
We were hoping for dinner but had only the mini mart
We went to sleep sure we’d find breakfast in the cafe we remembered seeing the day before
We went to the cafe but like so many buildings out here
It was out of business and for sale so we went to the grocery-ish store
That “grandpa” runs
I got his coffee from a machine and we all managed to buy something that resembled breakfast (like yogurt and a banana) the kids went back to the inn but I remained talking with grandpa while I drank my coffee and heard lots of stories about the ghost that lived in the store named Bill.
It was fascinating.
Then we went on to Mt. Vernon (another thirty miles or so) which had a real restaurant with real food!! We were in heaven in the “Silver Spur.”
Well nourished we went on thru John Day and finally landed at a campground in Prarie for six bucks a night. We set up tent and then did our laundry with detergent this time at “the washing well” which was painted blue.
I am blogging from the oxbow restaurant and bar that has a wooden floor a hundred years old and two gigantic wooden frames complete with half nude women.
It was an easy day being relatively flat, not too hot with good food. Forty five miles which we started at eleven. Tomorrow we have lots of climbing. Three mountain summits. At dinner we bowed our heads and prayed for a ride over. That kind of climb and seventy miles to the town we are trying to get to.
At one point today amidst the unphatomably huge landscape, I felt like “what’s the point of all this?
Then two bikers came along from the other way carrying there own gear, “self supporter” as it’s called. One of them said, “where are you headed?” we said “Virginia” and they said “we just came from there!”
“just” as in 3,800 miles. Love that.
First off, ive lost my glasses and cant see the text, so please excuse the mistakes
Also, since qe are camping we dont have power to power our devies even though i have a solar power iphone case
It still doesnt really powere enough
Thats why its a long time between blogs
And picture are shot on the iphone
And sometimes theres no power but the real deal is
The landscape is so huge and magnificent you cant begin to get in on a camera
Truly i am 24 /7 surrounded by magnificent nature out here
That’s over 80 miles!
Seems like a week has gone by since this morning.
I woke up to rumbling. Took me a while to figure out it wasn’t a new apple sound or people in an apartment above me moving furniture but long overly persistent thunder so
I got out of my sleeping bag and started to cover the panniers with the plastic bags I bought just in time in the supermarket last night(just in time)
As we were packing up camp it started to rain and by the time we left camp, all in our rain gear, the shower was over.
We did a long slow , not too steep thirty five mile climb to Mitchell. At the end, we kept thinking it was around every bend. Our anticipation and exhaustion level was high. The descent into Mitchell was an intense grade down ( the kind with the yellow warning sign for trucks) half way through it it started to pour. We pur our rain suits on again. When we got to Mitchell, there was hardly anything there! 2 cafes and a convenience store. We got there at noon, had chicken noodle soup (out of a cam?) at a cafe nd got some protein bars at the convenience store and heaedd out on the “8 mile” which is what they call it around here.
It was a lot of straight up for 8 miles but we actually managed it okay. The summit came before we were dead and then there was some forty plus miles of gradual descent. Those eight miles were non stop pouring sweat wearing a t shirt in coltish weather
The descent was smooth except that in the middle of that there was aHUGE downpour
So much so that we went through a rains tunnel as we were at the bottom neat rattlesnake creek ( saw one dead and one alive on the road) and the wind was coming straight up in our faces and we could hardly move and then it started to hail!!! It was super intense. Finally after some 80 miles we end up in Danville which has a nice family hotel and we have a private bath
That is where I am now finally blogging because we finally have electrical outlets to charge our devices
Great breakfast in sisters Oregon. There was a health food store there too.
A couple of people in sisters told us to detour from our map and go on ” the road less traveled” with less traffic.It was beautiful as is all Oregon. It was a bit tricky feeling like we knew where we were going but we did.
It seemed to go on and on however and we were way too hot. We are eating out of tiny grocery stores (what would be called “corner stores” in the city) and quicky marts and it’s cheap but a drag. These towns are so small there is not much in them and fifty miles between towns. It is hours and hours of gorgeous wilderness.
There is water everywhere. Fairy tale like lakes and literally always a river beside the road.
Just when we thought we couldn’t continue from being so tired, and thought we had another 14 miles to go once we got to the freeway, when we got to the freeway intersection, we were over joyed to see we were one mile outside of our next town which was Prineville Oregon.
We found a super candy and ice cream store that was air conditioned. We had milk shakes that we’re fantastic and then we went to the Laundrymat. There wasn’t any deterrent to buy so we hand washed with our soap and water bottles then threw them in the washer and dryer.
While they were in there, we went to the grocery store and bought dinner and breakfast and lunch for the next day.
The people in Oregon are super nice but the economy looks very depressed. It seems like fifty percent of the homes on the beautiful rivers in the country are for sale ($150,000) and a lot of the farms are too.
It is all white people in Oregon and they all seem to be Christian (Protestant variety) There are no African Americans at all, every now and then there is a Russian type. But so anyway, they are all very nice to me (a white person).
Biking Across the USA 