Mountain Home to Gooding - July 15th

Our visit to Mountain Home turned out to be quite pleasant. The town has 11,000 residents. Most work at the Air Base, and many are retired Air Force personnel. Farming centres around irrigation - potatoes, sugar beets and alfalfa. Where the irrigation channels reach, the arid earth is transformed into paradise. The water in the rivers is freezing, because it comes from the melting snow caps of the high mountains further north. The semi desert we cycled through from Boise yesterday is not close to the river water, thus for the most part the earth is left in its natural state (sage brush) and not ploughed. Many people commute the 40 miles on the highway to Boise to work there.

Yet again those vindictive sprinklers launched a surprize attack and certainly got the better of us - this time they went off suddenly while people were still sitting around chatting after dinner. What a commotion it caused, with everyone jumping up screaming and chairs and stuff flying! Then came the drill to grab garbage cans to turn them upside down over the sprayer heads....we are getting much quicker at that part now! What a blessing that they did not go on half an hour earlier while everyone had full plates of food on their laps!

Mountain Home to Gooding - 100 km

Tuesday started out cool with some much appreciated cloud cover. The UV rays still come through the clouds and burn the skin, but the heat rays are filtered and so it feels cooler on the bike. We were steadily climbing quite a bit today, with a couple of climbs at 4 to 5%. Most of us are getting so fit with rapidly strengthening climbing muscles that we hardly notice those long steady, mild climbs any more. The wild climbs that are coming in the Rockies we will still notice, I'm sure! Because of some misunderstandings some cyclists took wrong turns today and ended up coming into the halfway town of Glen's Ferry from 3 different directions! I'm glad for the route we happened to land on, since it went by a windmill farm and we saw two herds of white tailed deer with several fawns. All of them appeared to have sat down on a can of white paint!

Between Mountain Home and Gooding there are many fabulously developed irrigation farms, growing the above mentioned crops as well as corn. Often we could smell the fragrance of freshly cut alfalfa. Along the road were some ranches with beautiful muscled quarter horses, of which some looked quite intrigued by the strange, colorful stream of traffic of this day. I felt sorry for them,as mostly they had no shelter in those paddocks. I guess they have adjusted since birth to tolerate these extreme temperatures! Now I understand why cowboys wear those broad rimmed hats. The sun here is more lethal than a gun fight! The sun is eating at us now, with some people really burnt sore.

Gooding is a community of about 4,000 and they pride themselves on the fact that they have managed to keep the big stores like Walmart and food franchises out till now. The one they had allowed to sneak in is Dairy Queen, which all the cyclists enthusiastically descended on like a swarm of bees in this heat!

I felt better today than yesterday, and enjoyed the ride lots, taking it leisurely.Some people had multiple flat tires, as we rode through Goathead country. Eritia, from my small group, had 5 flats today! I always try to ride where the car tires go (on quiet roads that is), hoping that they have cleared the goathead landmines from the road for us. Our wonderful kitchen staff prepared the nicest spuds for dinner, and all the cycling cats purred about it.

Tomorrow I have to be back early as I am on the sweep team to prepare dinner. So I'll have to start early and stop the minimum to finish the 135km quickly!We do have the opportunity to stop by the Twin falls waterfall (200' high) and the local church plan to treat us to lunch.