Tire Troubles

By Uncle Hans

On our recent trip to Texas, we took the bike to tool around on.  This "bike rack", the subject of a blog before, is pure mechanical genius from a friend who is a mechanical engineer, but it puts a lot of stress on the rear tires.  We must have picked up a nail just south of Kansas City because.....BOOM.....she blew!!  I needed new underwear by the time I got it under control and on the shoulder........

...................... Well, on the cell phone and soon a huge truck shows up to change the tire.  I know we are in trouble when he asks to borrow my jack........

......The whole tire change process took 3 hours, and brought us back to a tire shop about 5 miles away.  Luckily, they had one of these rare special=order tires, but the bad news was it was 11 years old (in storage).  We got 10 miles on that and ....BOOM....another set of underwear!!  You can see from the picture that the whole sidewall collapsed.

So back to the tire shop and we had a new tire the next morning.  We left the bike in the parking lot of the tire shop and pressed on to Texas.  we picked the bike up on the way back along with a new tire to use as a spare in case we had trouble. (the old spare was an original issue tire, about 13 years old)..............

.....that cut our time on the beach by one day, but we made the best of the time we had.  This is Hannah and Charlie going for their morning 5-mile run......

By Uncle Hans