Day 5 and still alive...

View looking back over Prairie City to the mountains

The ride for Day 5 looked like a mini-Triple-By-Pass ride and it was. (The Triple-By-Pass is a very popular and torturous 110 mile ride in Colorado starting near Denver and ending west of Vale over 3 mountain passes with 10,000' of climbing in one day... Beth and I have checked that box).  The day started cool and a little overcast.  I rode the first two climbs solo.  22 miles and about 2500' of climbing.  After 4 days of 80+ miles per day, the legs were a little tired, but not too bad.  At the top of the 2nd climb, Beth joined me on her single to ride the decent and 3rd climb of the day.

The decent from the 3rd climb was to be a nice 30 mile roll into Baker City, OR. This would be our first scheduled rest day.  Well..... the first 20 miles were a great decent past beautiful Philips Lake surrounded by pine forests.  The weather had warmed up and the sky had cleared to make it just a gorgeous day... we even had a nice tail wind to help us along.  Then we did a small decent into a canyon  which to turned from east to north and smack into a BIG head wind.  The canyon finally opened up into the valley where Baker City is located with even more wind.

Another great view on the way to Baker City

The last 10 miles turned into a real slog.  Even though we were still on a slight down grade, we were lucky to hold 12 mph into the wind.  When we stopped at the edge of Baker City, I pulled out the anemometer and measured a pretty steady 12-15 mph wind with gusts up to 20.  Here is the track from yesterday.

Even so, it was another good day and it felt great to have made our first 5 days of riding on schedule.  Beth and Nicolas hit the Safeway to stock up on groceries and I got us checked into a really nice RV park on the north edge of town.  The Mountain View Trav-L-Park has great showers and a nice laundry.

The shower in our Sprinter RV is OK when you have no other options.  We have used it when the shower at the RV park just looks to sketchy to step in or they didn't have showers at all.  But getting a really nice shower once in a while is a great thing when you spend all day on the bike... covered with road spray on wet days, or bugs and sweat which has been the case the last couple of days.

Heading down the mountain toward Baker City

It is our rest day, so we headed to Boise, ID about 130 miles down I-84 to visit the state capital, pick up the replacement tandem whee from a UPS store where it was shipped and a few other things at a bike shop.  We got the new wheel, transferred the brake disk and gear cluster to the it and checked it out.  There were no other problems, so the tandem is good to go again.

After driving all the way to Boise to see the capital, was basically deserted.  The Idaho state legislature meets in January to early March, similar to NM and then they are gone.  So there were no tours, nobody at the Information desk... nada.  So here is a picture of Nicholas in front of the capital building just to show we were there.

As a conciliation,  not only did we have nice showers at the RV park, we had cable TV with TNT so Nicholas could watch game 7 between the Heat and the Pacers.

Idaho State Capital

After spending another night in the RV park in Baker City and we head on down the the road for another 5 days of riding.  Not sure if we will have internet access or not.  We'll be spending the night at a pretty remote RV park on Brownlee Reservoir.    Here is tomorrow's route.  Just a standard 85 mile / >5000' climbing day.

Overlook of the Prairie City, OR valley