Sea-to-Sea NA Day 13 For the last few nights it has been cool enough inside the tent for me to open up and use my sleeping bag. It was in the 50s outside. That also made it cool in the morning especially today when it was really more like 7 AM than 8 when we left. We switched from the Pacific Time zone to Mountain Time yesterday. We crossed into Idaho soon after the start of the ride. Rita had a flat on Anne’s bike yesterday when we left the coffee shop, just a small pinhole but it had to be fixed. This gave me a good opportunity to teach the ladies how to change and patch a tire/tube. Before that was finished we rolled the bike from the tent to the parking lot and we picked up another thorn in the rear tire. This was also a pinhole and we decided to go on to the Internet café anyway. I posted from that sit since our own equipment is totally unreliable. The ride was tricky today because of the complex route. Many people missed turns and ended up with many more km than necessary. We made one wrong turn but caught it right afterward. Sometimes the street names don’t agree with the directions other times the road name changes and you don’t notice it. It doesn’t take much. The support crew sometimes puts arrows on the road at tricky junctions but not always (and some states don’t allow it either). Although you can hardly notice it while riding, we were going uphill today, increasing our elevation by about 600ft. There was either a head or side breeze today since we kept changing direction. The temperature in the morning was not all that bad, probably 80 something. It might have been because of all the irrigation going on along the route. Farmers either sprinkle or have a kind of flood by gravity system in which the water is siphoned out of a ditch at the high end of the field and flows to the other in little trenches. Each row has it’s own hose and can be started or stopped at will. We saw wheat, corn, garlic, swiss chard, and many other crops growing this way. It is quite interesting to see how these canals start at a high spot (water is pumped to there) and then how it is channelled in all directions along the edges of the fields. Some of you have asked for pictures of the Rumba, and I will try to post some of those today. The ride stats; 105km, average speed was 25.3. A somewhat slow day, I guess I should have had a whole cinnamon bun at the coffee stop instead of ¾ of one.