Ice cream never tasted so good last night. Buying said ice cream was funny. As I went to grab the jar I over hear this guy say, “you have to drink your vitamins”. So I hear this and look over; I then see in his hand a V8. Seeing that I put two and two together, then this guy grabbed a case of beer. I laughed and he said “I know im contradicting myself with the beer”. I did not respond to the statement because I didn’t want to antagonize this guy that was roughly 2.76 times as big as me.
With a bursting stomach of dairy (after drinking 2 litres of milk as well) I went to sleep. When I woke up I felt refreshed. I have made a conscious choice to eat healthier then I have been because I have found myself drinking more and more crap. Even in the two days that I have implemented the changes I can feel the difference. Now granted I burn everything off anyways so I still do treat myself at snack time.
Ready to ride this morning I started tarring up the rolling hills. I thought my legs would feel slow from being beaten up in the hills yesterday for the first time in a while but my body surprised me yet again. Now don’t get me wrong I was still slow because the bike is heavy as heck, but I can notice the 16-pound difference particularly in the back end where 14 of the pounds came from. It also meant that I could get the weight lower so the bike handles better. Really things were going smooth.
I was 40 miles into the ride and planned to stop for water in a little homestead town. Things looked promising because I saw 3 businesses like buildings. Well two of them were boarded up so I went to the door of the one that was in business still. On the door was a note “due to lack of business we will only be open from 3pm till 6pm”. Great im screwed again. Thankfully I anticipated my luck and conserved my water properly. But that business really bothered me. If I have a struggling business I am going to do whatever I can to make it money. Promote it more, be open more, and get more people in. It does not make sense to close the doors for such long periods of time.
I got to my first town at mile 65 and had my snack. I knew that the next stop was going to be my rest stop 47 miles away so I topped up on water and took a muffin for the road. I knew I could make it to San Angelo with no lunch because I was ahead of my timeline for the day.
Well I did not make it that far. I had three tubes on me and thought I could limp my wounded front tire to the shop in San Angelo. I was wrong. The tire almost literally blew up. The thread just shattered and punctured every tube even after taping the tire to the gills.
I was really miffed because I want to just have a few days of solid riding. My body is feeling good it’s just everything else that’s going wrong. So I had to flag someone down and catch a life to the shop. In the car I masked my frustration and told stories of the road for the 30-mile journey into San Angelo. That’s right 3 flats in 10 miles, just brutal.
Over the Gps navigator in the car I heard the name of the bike shop and burst out laughing. The shops name was Concho bikes. The reason I laugh at this is because of a story my friend Corey who toured in Japan told me. In Japan they play this game called concho. In this game they sneak up behind someone, put their hands in a gun shape, yell concho, and then poke them up the bum. This is no joke you can youtube it. I told the guy at the shop the story and he said “no you don’t understand we aren’t perverts, concho are pearls here”. Again I just left the conversation at that and went on my way with my new tire rolling smooth.
This is when I realized I had another bike issue. I have a stripped bolt in my front rack. Even better it’s stripped while it’s halfway loose so it makes this awful clunk when you go over a bump.
Another great day of touring. The next 5 are going to be pretty similar because the way the roads are laid out they are spaced in 40 mile gaps so its either do 80miles or 120miles and destroy myself in the hills. With my luck im going to choose the 80 mile days for a while.
Trip Distance: 122km
Ride Time: 5:53hr
Avg. Speed: 20.86km/h
Total Distance: 14461km
Total Ride Time: 669hr
Destination: San Angelo, Texas
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