After yesterday’s strenuous effort, it wasn’t completely surprising that I would experience some cramps last night.  When I get them at home I carefully roll out of bed and walk around for a minute or two until they disappear.  Camping is more troubling as I need to extract myself from the mummy sleeping bag, unzip the tent door, somehow put on my shoes, then get up and do the walking around.  Every one of these moves hurts, with putting on shoes and getting up being the worst. What a relief when I finally get to walking around, which for some reason makes the cramps go away.  Fortunately, last nights episodes weren’t too severe.  It’s troubling how your body slowly degrades as you age.  I never, ever, experienced cramps when I was younger, no matter how I abused my body.

After yesterdays big effort and the cramps at night, I wasn’t sure if I’d have the legs today, it was a great cycling day as I covered 72 miles, most of it before lunch. I’ve now logged a total of 613 miles.  I hope to be through Idaho in another day and a half or so. Seems fast compared to Washington and Oregon, which felt like different versions of some giant state.

The descent back down to the river was by a different route than I took up and it turned out to be one of the nicest descents that I have taken.  Smooth road, little traffic and the grade was nice, very little need for braking, but fast enough for me and my load.  With my bike loaded the way it is, I’m only comfortable up to about 30 miles an hour.  One of those automatic roadside radar machines, clocked me at 28, which is plenty fast enough on a loaded touring bike.

After a lunch of rye crackers, cheese and salami, I stopped at the grocery store for some water and a few other things.  These national forest campgrounds often do not have water, so I brought some extra.  

At the end of the ride, I still had enough energy to race a thunderstorm to the campground and I guess we tied.  So far, not a lot of rain, but there is some scattered lightning, so I’m glad I’m off the road.

The campground is called the Wild Goose and it is in Clearwater National Forest.  This is the best campsite of the trip so far, right on the banks of the Clearwater River.

No internet at all here, so I will have to pretty up this essay with pictures and post sometime tomorrow.

Turns out it was two days before I could post this write up!