We were up early. Like 5am early! Packed up and were on the road at what we thought was our best ever time, 6:45am...yea for us. However, just going out of the campground and turning the corner we were in Mountain Standard Time. This made it 7:45am........now we have only gone about two blocks and we are an hour behind! Not fine.......oh well, it was cool and we knew we were in for some climbing.

There was a climb to get up to the Oxbow Dam then it was up and down but we had a head wind so it took a little longer than norm to go 11 mi then we had more UP to the Brownlee Dam which dams the Snake River. We stopped at Gateway the last stop before the last 6 mile push to the summit, Tanked up on French fries and Gatorade. Worked. We had a total of 3123 ft of elevation gain today! It was nearly 24 miles of up. Keep this up we will have quads of steel.

Today we met up with several of the TransAm racers. The route we are on was created in 1976 for the country's Bi-Centennial. It starts in Astoria, OR and goes to Norfolk, VA. Which is about 4,200 miles and usually takes afolks like us 90 days or so to travel. This year there is a race and it started on June 7th just three days ago in Astoria. Already 15 of the 40 or so racers have passed us. We met our first one, Patrick, at mile eight of our ride today. He was just waking up from a nap. Said he was starting to feel sleep deprived. He is doing around 200 miles a day. The leader a young man (young is the operative) from England is doing around 300 miles a day or so. WOW. 

They, however are NOT carrying any camping gear maybe a sleeping bag liner and water and that's it.