Day 54: Halfway to Somewhere (Council, ID to Halfway, OR)

Total Mileage: 80ish

Morning: 22 miles of rangeland before breakfast in the little town of Cambridge. We ate outside a drive-thru espresso shop, across from a miscellaneous store covered in viscously anti-Obama posters. We meet some wonderful people at the coffee shop, one of whom owned a trail building company that had done work on the Eno River in NC!

Afternoon: a gradual climb and a nice  long downhill into the Snake River valley. The view over the Brownlee reservoir was one of the mist spectacular we've seen on this trip (or anywhere for that matter). We speculated on what it might have looked like before the dam. The roadsides were covered in blackberries and an assortment of fruit trees. So much fruit that you could smell it warming in the heat before you saw it! We limited ourselves to a couple of sessions of berry picking, so as not to get too far off schedule.

Late Afternoon/ Evening: traveled away from the river into Hell's Canyon area. We found ourselves covered in dust as we moved into a drier zone. Took a siesta outside an abandoned restaurant to avoid the hottest part of the day and enjoyed a slightly cooler ride into Halfway. Halfway proved to be a cute little town, with a nice park to camp in, plenty of groceries (including coconut milk ice cream), and just enough kitschy stores and restaurants to catch a tourist's attention. We still don't know what we were halfway between!