Last nights meal at McDuffs brewery was great, and the beers fantastic. A big salad starter, but then the chIcken came with broccoli but no carbohydrate. No good for a hungry cyclist. So I had to balance the meal by having the chocolate brownie, made with their Porter beer. Quite the best ever. It was 5 inches square, and an inch and a half thick and had space on top for 4 huge scoops of ice cream. Oh, and lashings of chocolate sauce. 

We had a walk on Sandpoint beach, with some geese.

    
This morning our friendly host at Sweet Magnolia made us an excellent breakfast, and told us his life story. Used to be an engineer, down South, but came here on holiday ten years ago and stayed. ‘I had my mid-life crisis with my wife and family in tow’. They all came. Watch out Helen!

The first 25 miles today were round the north shore of the Pend Orielle lake. It is hard to say how good this was. The long views across the vast expanse of water were hazy, because of high altitude smoke from a huge bush fire about 35 miles away, but I took some close ups of the Pack River delta, and some floating logs.

        
Here is some geography for you. Sandpoint is on the site of the trigger for one of the most gigantic, spectacular, and cataclysmic flood events ever to take place anywhere on the planet. During the past ice age 13,000 years ago Sandpoint was just beyond the southerly extent of the ice cap. A glacial tongue projected south and, at Sandpoint, it blocked the Clark Fork River. Because the river is bounded by mountains on all sides this created an enormous lake south of the ice sheet, some 200 miles long and, in places, up to 2000 feet deep. The centre was at what is now Missoula, where we are headed tomorrow. It is thought that the lake took about 50 years to form, but the spectacular moment came with the near instantaneous collapse of the ice dam. Pretty much the entire lake emptied in about 24 to 48 hours – with a wall of water moving at 80mph, at about 100 times the flow rate of the Amazon. This created the ‘channeled scablands’ south of where we’ve been riding, towards Coulee Dam, and smaller temporary lakes where the water was constricted at various points before it escaped to the sea, creating the Columbia river gorge behind Portland. There is a 15 min video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Na-yPW-52I if you have time on your hands!

We turned up the Clark Fork river valley, entering Montana, the third state of the trip, and followed the valley all the way to Thompson Falls. At times the smoke haze obscured things, but in the afternoon the sun came through. 

 Lunch was at an amazing casino/bar full of pensioners playing cards. About 50 of them around card tables. 

The Montana rail line also comes through the valley – so we were treated to the sight and sound of these enormous trains rolling through.

And now we are in a basic motel, right beside the falls, now dammed. On arrival we discovered that we have skipped ahead by one time zone and gained an hour. We must really be heading East.

  
By the way, apologies for apparent lack of response to your comments. A glitch is disconnecting me from my server after just one post – so progress on posting anything is very slow. But I am loving reading them. Thanks.