| Back to the previous photograph | |
|
| |
 I had an unbelievable amount of trouble with the tyres today. There were three or four ordinary punctures, which aren't a serious problem but do take time, which is quite valuable when I'm trying to do a 185 km day in mid-September. The more serious problem was that this tyre split along the rim. I put it on the front wheel and tried patching it, which worked for me once in Colorado, but that did no good. I then remembered having seen pictures of tyres which had been fixed like this with cable ties. The ties wore through after an hour or two, at which point I found that Velcro straps worked much better. This arrangement did mean that I had to disable the brakes on the front wheel, which wasn't too serious a problem until 12 km from the end of the ride when the back tyre split in the same way. 10 km of that was on a wide, smooth, flat road with no junctions so it disn't seem too dangerous to be riding in the dark and the rain with two almost flat tyres and no brakes, but there's no way I'm going to attempt the final full-length day's ride on Sunday unless I can buy two new tyres on my rest day tomorrow. UTC Time: 07:16, Friday 09 September 2011 Local Time: 11:16, Friday 09 September 2011 Estimate of longitude: 34° 31' 18.05" E = 34.521680° Estimate of latitude: 54° 55' 21.94" N = 54.922760° Possible error on position estimate: 100 metres | |