June: 30: Day 48

George got to ride big part of his ride today but then had to get in the car for the rest of Idaho as the roads were very curvy, narrow and no shoulder, with high speed, and heavy truck traffic. I was the official “Road Scout” (not happily though as it was third day in a row of me mainly driving around in the car, my least favorite thing to do) today. We crossed over to Oregon via car. We tried to do some research about the speed limits in Oregon, including for our new route (which meets up with our old route in about 105 miles) here. Most people do not know the speed limit of back roads but some tuckers did say that the maximum speed on the freeway in Oregon is 55 mph (which they thought was really slow but we loved the sound of that). May be this means that the speed on the back roads will be lower too. Looking at the big picture of our route that we had chosen as it included “Yellowstone Park”, turns out that the association which makes the maps “Adventure Cycling (AC)” kind of messed us up. They are located in Missoula, Montana and it looks like that AC made up the route to make sure that cyclists would stop by their home town. But in doing so, you not only have to go about 400 miles out of the way but also have to ride through these dangerous roads of Montana and Idaho. We had seen that we were going out of the way but wanted to keep going on that route as we wanted to see Montana (turns out that it was not all that it was cracked up to be). In the hindsight (which is always 20/20), we could have gone a different route and saved us all that driving distance. Oh well, but at the end of the day, the good thing is that if George gets to ride through the rest of Oregon, we will be very happy. He is technically already at the mileage (about 50 miles short) that it takes to go from coast to coast on a bike (if you do no detours), which is pretty cool, if you ask me. As for Idaho, its prettier than other western states so far but some parts are pretty bare. People are very nice and friendly. Someone asked George if he was ok, when he was taking a break, which has not happened since Kansas. Roads, of course get thumbs down.
Little soap box: We talked with a local from Idaho. He was very apologetic that the roads are so dangerous for cyclists and gave us some insight on this issue. He said that the reason for the high speed limit is economical. Of course, we should have known that. He said that the when the speed limit was changed from 50 mph to 65 mph, there were about 200,000 more deaths on the roads that year. But they would not change the speed limit as the factories who want the trucks to get the stuff out and back to them faster and they do not seem to care that its killing more people. He said that he has talked to several truck drivers and they all have said the same thing that they have the pressure of getting to places faster in order to keep their jobs. So, that is the skinny on these high speeds, especially in Montana and Idaho.

We traveled from to Grangeville ID Ontario, OR
Total Miles: 60