Hi everyone! Welcome to days 56 and 57. Our day 56 started out in the beautiful Kamiah ID with a show and tell using things we found on the road while riding the previous day. It turned out to be mostly a show rather than tell but entertaining nonetheless.

The excitement of the morning was not over however, as Bryan decided to officially kick off the promposals for the approaching I4K prom. His promposal to Rose set quite an impossible standard for the rest of us unfortunately, so we are all now expecting the rest of them to be disappointing by comparison.

The days somewhat went downhill after the morning unfortunately. For some unknown reason none of us seemed to enjoy the ride in this day very much even despite the quite nice views of the hills and the river.

That was not the only reason for the day being not our best however. At one of our rest stops Zona lost her phone and could not recover it even after a rescue mission that involved driving all the way back from the stayover later in that day :( We also ended up needing to shuttle in the van the last 15 miles or so of the ride due to a forest fire nearby. Thankfully, it was not very severe of dangerous for either us or the locals.

The rest of the day we biked to showers which just happened to be on top of a huge hill of course, and then spent the rest of the time recovering from biking to said showers up a huge hill.

Day 57 I was van driving once again, thankfully for me. It was an incredibly hot day and the team had to face multiple big hills, including a 10 mile climb in the beginning of the day. Before that though, we crossed the state border into Washington and as per usual took a hundred pictures with the state sign.

The day was very long at almost 100 miles of riding, and most of it went through the exact same scenery offering zero to none mental stimulation for the riders.

The immense heat of the day made the riding tough for the riders but they found ways to entertain themselves and keep their spirits at least somewhat high nonetheless.

The good news from day 57 was that Matthew was able to find a record 11 license plates in one day!

The day was so long and tiring, that the only two things the riders had energy left for at the stayover was showering and getting dinner. Thankfully for us, our stayover was the Walla Walla YMCA so we got to take nice hot showers on site, which does not happen all that often.

-Valerie