Day 4: Kettle Falls to Oldtown, ID

All of us woke up eager to hit the road after the stellar 120 mile day yesterday. Albeit, Will was a little bit weary to get up, as his legs were pretty sore. Wes decided he wanted to go until lunch without a checkpoint to see if they felt comfortable going a decent stretch without me. It gave me some time to catch up on blogging. Once I dropped them at their starting point by the bridge, they were cruzed through town, passing the motel I was staying at. After an hour of sleep, I headed over to Walmart to restock on energy snacks. I've decided I much prefer the local convenience stores.

For lunch, we met up in Ione, a small town with a restaurant or two and a little drive up expresso bar. The lunch was small, a breakfast burrito for Wes, a protein smoothie for me and a cookie for Will. He's a fairly picky eater it seems. The expresso bar employees were very friendly, we spent our lunch, eating, drinking and chatting away. They gave us the upcoming weather report, telling us thunderstorms would roll in around 8 pm. Will and Wes wanted to get to the Washington/Idaho border, which would be cutting it close for sure. Will and Wes set off for their second pass of the day, a shorter one compared to the first. Meanwhile, I was determined to get the laundry done at the local laundromat. Needless to say, I got it all done in record time and still meet up with the biking duo at the next checkpoint. On the way out of Ione, to my surprise, I spotted a U.S. border patrol car.

After the checkpoint, I make a wonderful realization: I'm now in summer training season for Cross Country. I found a nice recreation area loaded with trails to putz around on. The entire first part of my run was uphill, but I didn't realize that until I got the turnaround and was totally exhausted running 7:30 pace per mile. Needless to say, the descent was quite refreshing.

After my run, I checked on Wes and Will again, as they descended into Idaho. The road ran tangent to a river, which can only be described as trademark, picturesque Washington. The bottom of the descent ran us directly into Oldtown, Idaho. While I waited for them, I found a nice beach on the river to do some core work. 

At 8pm, sure enough, the rain started to come down. Lightning covered the sky and thunder ran through the clouds. I've never seen it rain so hard in quite the while. I'd compare it to the nightly thunderstorms in Phuket, Thailand. Thankfully, we found a homey bread and breakfast off the highway. The home owners lived upstairs and had four kids. It felt like we were guests at their house rather than a B&B. It was definitely one of the more interesting place we chose to stay, but it was better than camping that night for sure.