We hung the bags on my bike this morning and Linda headed back to Portland to catch her plane. This is me looking all confident and tanned
and ready to embark on my solo touring adventure on a bike that is almost exactly the same color as the sidewalk.

I crossed the Snake River into Idaho and jumped on the levee bike path, This is a historically significant bit of industrial decay across
the Clearwater River.

Something tells me this path is not heavily used.

As luck would have it, today was Culdesac's annual Shebang Days. Apparently Shebang Days is only one day.
No idea what that is about. I could speculate, but I'd probably be wrong. I don't know because just before I reached
Culdesac I turned onto Winchester Grade.

The idea behind taking Winchester Grade was to do all the climbing at once in a relaxed, unhurried, low-traffic environment.
An idyllic, pastoral setting. But it was really hard. It took all morning.

Winchester Grade has a lot of switchbacks. You can see some of them in the picture. It was about 3000 feet of climbing.

I took to riding a mile, then resting for a couple minutes. This is how I knew I was near the top. I stopped for lunch in Winchester.

The rest of the day was much easier. There were a few small climbs--but nothing I couldn't see the top from the bottom.
Lots of grasslands. Mountains in the distance though.

And some industrial decay of the old west.

This apparently is a B&B. For people I guess. It's in Cottonwood, Idaho.

Notice that the fire plug has a port-o-john in it. Clever.

I was 25 miles from Grangeville when I saw this town in the distance. "I wonder if that's Grangeville," I says to myself, hoping that it wasn't--after
all, I wasn't really heading toward it. But it was.
Tomorrow I head into the mountains. Woo-hoo!