Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Day 57: Hammett, ID to Nampa, ID

Today started - at 5:30am - with Joann making us a wonderful breakfast of pancakes, orange juice, and fresh fruit. If only we could have a morning like that every morning. She also sent us off with an entire cantaloupe. Heavy, but delicious.

Riding through Hammett wasn't so bad - there was certainly more of a town than I'd been able to spot from the bridge. West of Hammett we found bugs. Lots of bugs. And it was already hot. In order to stay ahead of the bugs we had to travel more than 12 mph - which just wasn't going to happen climbing back out of the valley.

There really wasn't much to see beyond hay bales until we got to Mountain Home. I'll spare you pictures.

We stopped at the Albertsons, had some donuts (well, I did), then stopped again at the bike shop to buy spare back tubes and a new back tire (as a spare - can't be too careful). This meant we were now carrying two back tires - the slightly wrong sized one we'd been forced to purchase at Walmart back in Jerome and the new, right sized one. We stopped again at a gas station near the interstate north of town. It was very, very hot. Jillian, as always, was probably ready to take the highway, but I wanted to follow the frontage road, since I hate riding the interstate.

We followed the frontage road. According to the Garmin we'd be able to stay south of the highway the entire way. Google Maps thought the road would end. The road did abruptly dead end - causing us to travel an extra two miles. Plus we found a whole bunch of dogs, which took some effort to get away from. I hopped back on the Garmin and found us an alternate route. The road names in this area were a little funny.

The other road names were even weirder - all about beaches and oceans, even though we were hundreds of miles from the coast.

We did pass one development, complete with private airport. I'm not sure who would want to live out here.

Now that it was easily 100 degrees (remember that we'd been wearing gloves two days earlier) we were desperate for any stop. Imagine our relief when we spotted the Sinclair.

We camped out at on some chairs outside and had our Cantaloupe.

We drank a lot of fluid. We bought a root beer for Jillian, Hi-C for me, Powerade, and lots of water. It was almost disturbing how much water we'd had. We took some time to just sit as well, glad to not be in the sun.

When we did get back on the road, it was on the interstate. There were no alternate routes at this point, and we only had to travel one exit, getting off at Kuna. Not that Kuna was at the exit - we had a long way to go.

We'd had to make a decision about how we were going to get west of Boise. Our original plan had been to ride the highway another exit and get off to ride through Boise. Now that we were extra short time we wanted to skip Boise all together and ride around the traffic and stop lights. Kuna was our answer.

There are no photos from this section of the ride. There was nothing to see, except for some storm clouds to our south. We had to keep working in order to stay ahead of those.

When we did reach Kuna, almost twenty miles later, we found a Quiznos and had some dinner (and more drinks). I called home and got a weather report. Possible showers, but mostly clear if we kept moving. We got moving again - excited that there were only some fifteen miles left to our stop.

There again wasn't too much to see north of town. Things were greener, but mostly due to people living there and watering their lawns. We had an unnecessary climb over a rail road bridge, and then had some trouble finding the hotel. It was dark by now, and Jillian was navigating by way of the Garmin. That was hard, since the Garmin kills your night vision. Little did I know, but the Garmin was giving different street names from what was actually there. That was very frustrating, since here I thought Jillian couldn't even use a Garmin, when in reality the Garmin was all wrong.

We found a hotel, and though we didn't have a reservation we were fortunate in that the Super 8 Nampa had a first floor room available for us. We checked in and headed over to the Denny's to find some dinner (also, free refills on beverages). Service was good, though it took forever to get out of there and back to the hotel to sleep. We stopped and grabbed cookies at a gas station on our way back to the hotel, where we simply crashed, exhausted.

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