Day 10 - 45th Parallel

Todays mileage: 52
Total Mileage: 504
End point: Baker City, OR

Today has quite simply been my best day riding yet - or well to be honest, the best afternoon as I slept quite late as the bike shop didn't open until 10am. I'm going to try and keep todays entry a bit briefer as I have just found out this campsite has a hot tub!! Woohoo! And also only charged me $10 again.

Mountain Works Bike Shop in La Grande was great - the guys in their sorted me out properly. Two new bontrager tubes (one for free :), a new mirror (which doesn't wiggle and is much bigger and clearer), some CO2 canisters (no more pumping) and best of all a free Oregon bike map. The bike map highlights how suitable a road is for cyclists with green, yellow and orange - I'm guessing they didn't want to scare anyone with red! After a quick coffee I headed off to Union.

I literally flew to union, there was a strong wind behind me and I was averaging 40km/h. The roaded was floaded either side which had created a marshland and every now and then I set off some ducks who went scattering off. In Union I did a quick pit stop and got chatting to a man about his whiskey tasting trip in Scotland.

I headed from Union through a beautiful quiet patch of road through a canyon for about 15 miles, it was spectacular and as I came out of the canyon I was created by rows of wind turbines. And then no suprise at all about 3 miles down the road, signs campaigning about windfarms!! It's the same everywhere! (*Pam that apostraphe was for you - see I do know how to use them*)

The road led me to North Powder, love the name but the only thing to note about the place was that the roads were simply 1,2,3 and a, b, c, d... I'm thinking about paying to have one named after me! I was originally only planning to do around 40 today and stop in Haines, but with the weather 70f and sunny I decided to push on to Baker City - I've average 28 km/h today - not so bad with all this stuff I am lugging.

One last cool thing I spotted before I reached Haines was a big sign announcing I was crossing the 45th parallel - midway between the north pole and the equator, pretty cool! It never even corssed my mind before the trip.

Anyway I said i'd keep this one short. The hot tub awaits and apparently there is a good brewary in town I need to check out!