Green River Lake

Green River Lake

Wednesday was finally the day for our bike ride.  I know I've been leading you on in this regard about plans to take a tandem ride over to Green River Lake.  Names like this always puzzle me.  I have a friend back in Ontario, CA that lives on a street called Desert Forest....what?  Is it a forest or a desert?  Is it a river, or a lake?  Anyway, I digress.  Green River Lake is a reservoir built by the Army Corp of Engineers in 1969 and covers a little over 8200 acres, and is filled by, you guessed it, the Green River!

After writing my blog post for Tuesday I got busy preparing the tandem for our ride.  I think the last time we rode it was in Vancouver when we did the long ride over to Ft. Vancouver and back.  That was the day we blew out another rear spoke, which I replaced while we were in Twin Falls, but we never got out on it, or any of the bikes while we were there.  That was when we got into walking every day in preparation for our Amazon gig.  So, this was the first time on it since August.  

The riding distance to the lake is around 7.5 miles, and the highway for about half the way has a very wide shoulder, which was unexpected, but we were bucking a stiff headwind for the first 3.5 miles.  Nevertheless, the air was balmy, and the views were great.  It took us about 45 minutes to cover the 7.5 miles over to the lake, and we were treated to a lot of color in the autumn foliage.

We just sat at a picnic table for about 30 minutes talking and enjoying the view, then remounted the tandem and rode through the campground.  Surprisingly there are not many Amazon campers at the lake, and not many people in general.  I suspect that many Amazon people have opted for parks a little closer to the facility as the other RV parks we passed on our ride were completely full.  

After touring the RV park we headed back to Heartland.  The ride back saw us being pushed along by a strong tailwind.  On the way out we were running around 11 mph, but on the way back we were pushing over 20 mph at times!  It was great to get out and ride, and we will try to do the ride to the lake a couple of times a week.  Additionally, we discovered there are a lot of mountain bike trails running through the park, so I will take my mountain bike over this Saturday morning and do some exploring on my own.  

We arrived back "home" around 1pm. TLE made a PB&J on rasin/cinnamon bread........mmmm good!  After a 30 minute nap I headed out to the "garage" around 2:15  for my daily workout sans the stair stepper routine since I had just ridden 15 miles earlier.  

For dinner before work TLE prepared the most amazing stir fry....I cherished every single bite, and was it ever spicey!  It wasn't long after that 5pm came and we headed off for our 5 hour shift.  The night started with a 30 minute staff meeting.  Apparently sometime in mid November we will be given mandatory overtime adding a 5th 10 hour day t our schedule, and then sometime in early December we will be offered a 6th voluntary overtime shift.  We're not sure if we are down for working 6 out of 7 days, but we'll see how we feel at that time.

Our night of "picking" went fast, and we made our way home for the evening.  Only two more days of half shifts then we are into some serious all night work from 5:30pm to 4am 4 days a week, then into five 10 hour shifts sometime after November 10th.  Can't believe we're about to finish our second week at Amazon.....only 8 to go!

Thanks for stopping by!