Sea-to-Sea NA Day 9 The prospect of over 3000 ft of climbing gets most of the group moving early in the morning. It seems to be just a little earlier every day. I have no trouble going back to sleep at 5AM but Rita is up not long after that. Lots of riders are on the road by 7. Breakfast officially ends at 7:30. It is another sunny day when we set out at 7:40. Anne M. has waited but Florida Bill has gone on ahead. The air was already hot but cool breezes emerged from the shadows every once in a while. We stopped to help Gale change a rear tube (there is lots of glass on the bike lanes in the towns and this causes many flats. I try to avoid them or ride as close to the car lane as possible where the road is cleaner. The climbing started just outside of town but didn’t get serious until about ½ hour into the ride. As on many climbs you cannot see the top of the hill from the bottom. In some ways this is good if you are an optimist and assume the hill is short or at least not 20km long as this one turned out to be. Actually other than a few undulations at the top this climb continued for close to 50km. The grade was such that I was able to keep the chain on the middle sprocket at the front for the whole ride, at 10-12 kph. The photos will show you the terrain much better than I can describe it. There were miles and miles of wheat fields across the valley below us. There were various wild flowers along the road. Once on top we entered a pine forest and our road ran parallel to I84. We even had to go on that 4 lane highway for one 11km run half of which was downhill at 60-70kph and another short piece. The nicer downhill was before the I84, a twisty road through the forest with enough of a slope to maintain 50-65 kph. The road ran parallel to the train track for a while. The freight train had 9 locomotives in order to pull it up, over and to control the speed on the decent. Tonight we are camped in a park in La Grande, 92 km from our starting point. Because of all the climbing my average speed was only 21kph. There is a swimming pool here and an ice-cream parlour just down the road. The large Black Cherry milk shake sure went down well.