into Idaho

Camping under the stars behind a Boise Social Housing complex....NICE!!!!!



Party for Alana's front wheel in Caldwell, Idaho...it made it to Idaho and over 1000 kms without a flat and is still going strong!



Party for Alana's front wheel in Caldwell, Idaho



Yummy salad that we made for the party...mmmm feta cheese and garlic!


From Baker City we had an awesome day riding downhill all the way to Huntington - Catfish capital of Oregon! =P The campsite beside the Snake River was really nice, but kind of buggy and it was so hot that we couldn't even walk from our site to the lake. We just kept soaking ourselves in a nearby sprinkler whenever it got unbearable (until the inmate work crew turned them off, that is).

So when we got there, we picked out the best site with the most shade, close to the bathrooms etc and then Mr. "BlingBling" with his huge pickup with the shiny hot motorcycle with American flags hanging off the side mirrors, towing a massive RV pulled right into our site, right where we were sitting and had our stuff spread out and basically forced it away from us. Grrrr!!!! The rest of the campground was practically empty, too... karma will get him.

The next day we biked from there to Ontario, just a few miles away from the Idaho border. We stopped to pass the heat of the day under a tree in front of the library, and planned to keep biking that evening when it cooled off. While we waited it out, a guy who rode around town and the highway collecting bottles to return stopped to chat. He was sweet but kind of drunk. He really wanted to help us out, and ended up biking around town to collect tourist maps and information for us about Idaho so in the end he really did help!

That evening we arrived at about 8pm at an RV park outside of Caldwell, Idaho, and there was a sign on the door saying to just pick a camp spot and pay in the morning when the manager got back. We were pretty sure that we would leave before the manager got there in the morning, so we planned to just leave the $10 in an envelope with a note. Well, at 1am the hidden underground sprinkler system came on and shot right into the tent through both mesh doors and soaked us and all of our gear. It sucked big time. We ended up having to move the tent onto the sharp crumbly concrete parking spot and sleep there, wet, for the rest of the night. We were PO'd. Anyway, since we left at 6am anyway we didn't feel like paying for that crappy night so we left a note explaining that we'd been there but giving them some constructive criticism on how to improve their level of customer satisfaction. Later that morning, as I was fixing a flat while Alana waited a few hundred metres in front of me, a crazed man in blue overalls pulled over onto the shoulder beside her and demanded that she pay. Alana, who was in the middle of having an asthma attack and couldn't even respond to him, ended up having to just hand over the money because he was kind of creepy and she needed him to go away immediately. Essentially, she paid him to go away, not for the campsite.

We only made it to Caldwell that morning (about 19km) because we were burnt out from lack of sleep, too many days in the heat, and "biker rashes". So we decided to stay in Caldwell for a rest and that was a good decision - except that for some reason we keep ending up in the strangest time-warp places during our rest days (Alana says, "think 'Napoleon Dynamite' "). We had an eating and "Man vs Wild" marathon ( TV show about this guy who parachutes into really intense wilderness situations and finds his way out - highly recommended, crazy guy) for two whole days! It awesome and air conditioned. Yippee!!

From Caldwell, we had another short ride to Boise, where we had to find a bike shop to get some supplies. We had gone through all of our inner tube patches, Alana needed new gloves, and I needed to resolve the flat tire situation. I got some good new tires and, for good measure, some "slime tubes". I've never seen slime tubes in Canada before... basically they're just inner tubes filled with this goo stuff that moves around and plugs punctures as they happen - technically eliminating the need to patch them externally. I know it sounds gimicky and amateurish and polluting, but they are actually supposed to do a decent job. And let's face it! I'm desperate! Flat #17 was the last straw.... >=O

So, there was nowhere to stay in Boise. No campsites, nada, and it was already the middle of the day and too hot to depart for the next city which was 50 miles away. We went to the library to look for places to stay using the couch surfing website and ended up running into a cyclist named Bryan. He was a really interesting person who had done a lot of cycle touring and understood the situation that we were in and wanted to help us out. He ended up finding us a place on the grass behind a social housing complex where the friendly people let us camp. He also went out of his way to bring us Gatorade and library books with good detailed maps of the area. Thanks, Bryan! (by the way, we returned the books to the library because Alana's little fists could not bang on the door loudly enough to wake you up... just in case you didn't get our note =P )


Contrary to what we heard about Idaho before coming here, it's a great place. We've met lots of nice people (lots of kooks too, though), the roads are in decent condition and we haven't met a "goat head" yet. Bikers here are paranoid about goat heads... a quick Wikipedia search explains that:

The nutlets or "seeds" are hard and bear two sharp spines, 10 mm long and 4–6 mm broad point-to-point. These nutlets strikingly resemble goats' or bulls' heads; the "horns" are sharp enough to puncture bicycle tires and to cause considerable pain to bare feet.

Here's to a goat head-free Idaho! =P