This blog is for yesterday, June 21st, the year’s longest day. I would have written it last night, but I was so tired I just went to bed. It turned out that I had made a mistake in my mapping, and instead of 55 miles, we had 65, with a very long and steep hill to climb. I did pretty well until about noon when the temperature started to climb, it got up to 98 degrees. We decided that camping in this heat would not be fun, so we called and canceled our campground reservations and reserved a room at a motel in Mountain Home, Idaho. The cold shower and air conditioning were excellent and revived my “near-death” body.

After lunch yesterday, I told Cliff and Kathy to go ahead of me because I was going to take more breaks than they were. I started with a water break every five miles, then I dropped it to every two miles, then every mile, and by the time I got to the motel I was stopping every quarter mile, but I made it!

We have decided because of the heat to stay in motels the rest of the way instead of camping so we can sleep at night. We have two nights scheduled at churches and one at a friends house so that will mean we stay in motels four nights.

I saw the funniest sign yesterday. It was next to a field with lots of rocks in it about the size of basketballs. It said, “Petrified Watermellons, Pick One Up for your Mother-in-law.” One of the things about riding a bicycle is you see a lot of things you would otherwise miss, and you smell a lot of things as well!

As we planned out our day last night we couldn’t find any motels within biking distance in the direction we were going. I searched and searched with my IPad with no results and the temperature was forecasted to be over 100 degrees today. So, I called our son, Seth where we had stayed a couple of nights ago and asked if he would mind driving over, picking us up and driving us to a motel. He agreed and will be here soon. He is a good boy, I am sure I messed up a good Saturday that he was planning on spending with his family. So today will be a rest day as we ride in a car to our next destination, which I do not mind at all.

One of my mottos is “Plan your life well, and then adjust the best you can to the unplanned, and don’t fuss!”