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(Day 30) Pizza: it's a much better lunch than puddinq

[Next mail stop:
Andrew Morton
c/o Brad Bynum (this is so only one of us has to go into the post office to pickup mail. )
General Delivery
Casper, WY 82609]

Our 70-year-old neiqhbor, Dick, woke us up at 08:00 by describing how well lip balm worked on his hemroids and then launched into another round his stories. It was like the pudding in a verbal medium: the stories were interesting but there's only so many you can hear before getting a bit sick. Somehow we managed to say GOOD BYE (you had to almost shout for him to slow the story down enough to be heard) and got going by 10:00.

We went down into the park a little ways and rode along one of the interpretative trails but decided we wanted to hurry up and get to Arco for lunch. At the visitor's center, where we'd stopped for water, Brad realized that one of the metal pins that holds the Bob trailer onto his bike was missing. I went in and asked if they had a coathanger or something I could use to secure the trailer. I narrowly avoided another conversation with Dick while I was waiting. They had some wire that we used to secure it so we were able to continue. [7/2/01 we called Bob and they're mailing us some replacement pins]

We pushed on to Arco and were ready for lunch. Brad had mentioned pizza and I was all for it as long as there was a salad bar. Amazingly there was a pizza place and they even had a one-shot salad bar. We stuffed ourselves and I perfected my saladbar-kung-fu, I fit about 5 lbs of vegetables on my plate.

We must have sat at that pizza place for two hours digesting. This time the long lunch worked in our favor, it had started to cool off by the time we left. With a full stomache it was pleasant riding. We knocked down 40 miles before the sun set on the way into Mud Lake.

I'd needed to page a friend so instead of stealth camping along the highway in the sagebrush before town, we went on into town in the dark. The bar we stopped in was exactly what you'd expect in a small hayseed town. There were four or five farmer types sitting around giving the western movie on the TV a thousand-yard-stare, an older crosseyed lady tending bar, and only Michelob on tap. I used the phone then we got a beer and sat down to watch the movie. We didn't ever learn the name of the movie, but Brad identified Burt Langcaster and I recognized Lee Marvin, it was really one of his signature films complete with chalkboard mission planninq, fretting about the necessary split second timinq but completing the mission only to find that the bad guys have cut off their escape. We left before they could finish off the bad guys.

The problem with being in town after dark is that it's impossible to find a place to camp. There could be a thousand places to camp but you can't see them because you really want a spot that isn't visible from the road. Eventually we found some people we could ask, they pointed us across the street to the baseball field that we would never have spotted.

Idaho has one big problem, the most common animal bred here is the misquito. By coming down into all the farms and canals in the valley, we'd entered primemisquito breeding grounds. That night was so hot and humid and with no shower since Boise I was so sticky that I slept with the sleeping bag on top of me. It was horrible, I woke up several times praying for dawn. My bag would start sticking to me so I'd shrug it off but then the mosquitoes would fly in and stinq me in spite of all the Off I'd applied, and the Off just made me stickier. Arrggh! This was the first time on this trip I've had dreams of a shower.

andrew

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