Idaho Hot Springs

Summer of 2006 saw me once again hooking up with the Alaskan Chicks, a.k.a Trail Tramps, for a week of pain ... err, mountain biking. This time we ventured to the Boise National Forest in Idaho for a tour that would have a lot of climbing and feature several natural hot springs.

It was to be a "climber's tour." If you know me, you know I'm not a climber. Oh, I believe in climbing all right, if only to increase the amount of time I spend on the bike at velocities that are not likely to cause major bodily damage. And there's just something karmic about having to put in the effort to go up before you have all the fun of going down. But a climber's tour? That made it sound like there would be a lot of climbing.

As it turned out, there was.

Preparation (I'm flying where)?

Before I could ride, I had to get there. In this case, "there" turned out to be Boise, Idaho. There are not that many places in the world where I never thought I'd ever go; for instance, it didn't seem very likely I'd ever get to the Galapagos Islands but I thought there was the remote possibility, and in fact I lucked into a trip there last December. But Boise ... Boise was not one of those places I ever had any interest in, never thought I'd go anywhere near. And yet there I was buying airplane tickets.

My typical practice on these trips is to fly out on a ticket using Frequent Flier miles that I have accumulated with one of those airline credit cards, drastically reducing the cash outlay for such trips. So I wandered over to aa.com to pick up a round-trip ticket ... and found that if I wanted to go to Boise from Boston on American Airlines, I was going to have to go to Los Angeles or Seattle first. Minimum trip time: 17 hours. Umm, no thanks. Free tickets aren't worth that kind of pain.

A quick trip to an online travel agent showed that the best airline for me was Northwest, changing planes in Minneapolis. 7 hours total trip time. Much better.

Andy, who lives around the corner from me, booked tickets on the same flight, and by coincidence the second leg of the flight coincided with the second leg of Andy's brother Joe's flight.

And so the trip began, with Andy, Joe and myself landing in Boise on Saturday.

Prologue - Saturday - Sunday - Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Epilogue
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