Sea-to-Sea NA Day 16 Remember what I said yesterday about the sprinkles? Clear communication is very important. It is not enough to say that the sprinklers are off. The janitors assume we will be in one area but inevitably we take more space. So last night just as most of us had finished eating the sprinklers came on in that area. Rita got it right in the back; others had books and lawn chairs soaked before we could find things to put over the heads. Others took advantage of the nice cool shower. Last night Ad, our rider representing the CRWRC, who lives in Haiti, told us about the work they do there and the living conditions. It was interesting. The time of reckoning has come. Pay-up time. No more lazy days. We work into it with a 100km ride today. Tomorrow is 130, then 138, then a shorter day but Saturday will be a killer day at over 150km combined with a lot of climbing over an 11,000 ft high pass. Of coarse there will be the downhill from the top of the pass too. The sky had clouds in it this morning for the first time in about 2 weeks. A welcome sight because we knew they would give us some protection from the relentless sun. There was a headwind for much of the morning as we rode through sagebrush areas and then prime crop-growing areas. We finally saw a field of the famous Idaho potatoes. As always the fields are irrigated using any of the methods I’ve described earlier. Even though we ended up only 500 ft higher than we started, we climbed 1000 ft over a pretty steady grade over the last 40km of the ride. Such a climb is not difficult but it does play tricks with you. You know how hard your working but don’t necessarily see that you are climbing so you wonder why you’re not going faster. The head wind didn’t help either. In the end we did the 100km in 4 hours of riding and had several breaks along the way. A lot of riders took wrong turns, which can lead to a lot of extra riding because cross roads are few and far between, but they did find there way back to the route. Gooding is a small town of about 4000 people but they have a nice new school for us to use.