It was a great feeling waking up knowing that today we'd be finished with Oregon. It helped me forget about sleeping on the rockiest soil God saw fit to leave in the entire state.
There are a couple of things we'd gotten used to about Oregon. The first thing visible in any town being either a Les Schwab tire store or sign advertising a store. Only putting mile markers on one side of the road and the numbers count total mileage in the state (in Nevada and California they put mile markers on both sides and the mileage resets at each county line). Walking back into a store after drinking a beverage and swapping your bottle for your 5-cent deposit back. All the dirty hippies trying to get to the Rainbow Gathering in Idaho.
We hit a Dairy Queen in Vale after a long hot morning, got a Blizzard, filled up some water got the hell out of Oregon. Not that we expected Idaho to be much better, but we'd spent twenty something days there and were ready for a new state. Got a picture of us on the Idaho side of the Snake River and I swear you can see the flies, they swarmed as we soon as we were across. I felt like the nucleus of a uranium atom. We'd out run them on the downhill but they'd catch us on the uphill, the only good thing was they weren't stinging us.
Slowing down in Parma I ended up with a flat. Brad walked off to see if there was some place we could camp near by and I got started fixing it. As I was half way done two Mormon missionaries pulled up and asked if I needed any help. I told them I was pretty much done but told them about the trip. They were stoked on it, they asked if I knew who they were and if I'd ever read the Book of Mormon. I told them yes, I knew who they were but no, I'd only read Orson Scott Card's Homecoming books that are based on it. They said they had the real thing in the trunk and would I mind a copy. I'd already been given a copy that I'd left at home after deciding there wouldn't be any time to read it so this seemed like a good time to pick one up. We talked a bit more before the mosquitoes that were now swarming became too much. Brad got back shortly and we put my bike back together then headed for a campground in Caldwell.
It was one of the less safe things we've done. Pushing on the 20+ miles was easy with the 30 mile per hour tailwind that had just appeared in Parma but it was dark and the shoulder wasn't great. We'll definitely try to avoid doing that again but it put us 25 miles outside of Boise.
andrew
Posted by drewish at June 23, 2001 12:00 PMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)