Riding through the mountains, the three of us kept our Sena's connected, as we did for the whole trip, which made it a lot of fun because we could comment on things as we rode by as well as pass warnings back and forth. Along the way on this first day I discovered that my USB plug was faulty and not charging anything. This would hamper my ability to keep things charged up, but I did have my charging "brick" which got me through things as the trip progressed.
Around 5:30pm we rolled into Haven Hot Springs and asked how far to Lowman, only to be told we were in it! What a laugh, and what a small town. We got gas and decided to stay the night there. The owners were really nice people who let us camp in the yard behind the restaurant. The food was excellent and so were our hosts. We had the warm pool to ourselves for an hour which while not a shower, was pretty darn close! We all thought the owners
and the two women that helped them were out of place in Idaho. Way too sophisticated for small town Idaho. It made for a really nice first camping. When we were walking back to our tents after swimming we walked beside four muley bucks that decided to bed down about 50 feet away on the hillside skirting the property. I think we were the intruders, not they. We had a little fire, chatted for a bit, then hit the sack. It was a great first day and we clocked 140 miles.
Saturday, September 12, 2020
As would be our pattern in the Mountain Time zone, we pull away around 9:25am and rode four miles to the turn off which would take us eventually to the Long Creek water crossing that we had all been anticipating/dreading. The road follows the creek for a bit, then takes off to the right, going over the mountain and down a bunch of switchbacks leading to the river crossing. Dave waded across with his fully waterproof boots and it never got over the top of his boots – a good sign. Tim was leading this day, so he was the first one to cross. We knew we needed to stay left, but he got started too much to the right, got bounced further right by a rock and then hit two more that tipped him left and he went down. He was up very quickly so there was no water in the engine, but he couldn't get it started in the stream, so Dave jumped in and helped push him across.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
