I was up by 5:30 and on the road by 7. It was cool when we left but quickly got hot. Today the scenery didn’t change much, lots of sage brush and brown hills. There was a little climbing in the trip, most of it pretty early on. We did see more wildlife today: a burrowing owl, a coyote and 1 live jackrabbit and a lot of dead ones. It didn’t seem that their ears were very lucky. Tonight we are in Mountain Home, ID in a new middle school that is a first class place -- I’m able to sit here in the gym in air-conditioned comfort. We stopped at the local bike shop on the way in. There was a fellow there by the name of Raymond who had a Penny Farthing type bike that several of us had to try out -- it was a hoot.
Last night I talked to Dennis Grelk and Chris Cortez . . . sounded like the races at Northbrook and Kenosha went pretty well with the exception that Gary Toy lost control of his bike and Chris t-boned him. Gary suffered a separated shoulder and road rash. Chris was able to continue but didn’t finish the race. Sounds like Gary will be down a while, but otherwise ok.
We had some troubles with sprinkler systems dousing people in the middle of the night, but today as we were standing along the school in the shade waiting for the gear truck to reposition the sprinklers suddenly went off, dousing several riders! It still amazes me how much is irrigated out here. If it’s green it’s irrigated, otherwise it's brown desert. At the peloton last night we heard from our Haitian rider Ad De Blioji, who works for CRWRC in Haiti. He talked of his work there and some of the complexities in trying to break the cycle of poverty there.
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