Day 37: Tyresome

Neither of us saw much urgency in getting going, so we raided the motel breakfast, went back to the room for more World Cup, and didn’t actually leave until eleven — at which point we promptly found a Wendy’s for a second breakfast. It never ceases to amaze me how much junk I can eat on this trip and still watch the weight fall off.

Few double stacks for breakfast.

Kansas had already been flat, but today pushed the idea to its logical extreme — you could all but watch the curve of the earth on the horizon, the roads were that level. We’d also managed to time our crossing with the wheat harvest, which meant a steady procession of combines being hauled from field to field, each one wide enough to claim the entire road for itself. Lunch found us in the improbably named Rush Center, where we ducked into a bar for a couple of hours and let the worst of the heat pass us by.

The afternoon, as it so often does, is when things got interesting. Joe asked if I could see anything wrong with his back tyre. “Yeah,” I told him, “it’s pulsating.” We pulled into a rest stop to find a bulge the size of a fist — the tyre had well and truly outlived its usefulness. He’d planned on replacing it in Pueblo, but it hadn’t waited that long; the thread was already showing through. A strip of gorilla tape bought us a few more miles before we had to stop at a service station to check on it again, only to find the tape already worn clean through. He moved the tyre to the front, where it would carry less weight, wrapped it again, and we limped onward toward Ness City.

Just as we were about to leave, a heavyset young guy came out to see what we were up to. He spent his days fixing truck and tractor tyres, and he wasn’t about to let a bicycle stump him — he pulled out an industrial tractor-tube patch, smeared on a layer of rubber cement, and pressed it over the wound like it was nothing. The result looked practically indestructible. Joe would just have to live with the small thump it gave off with every single rotation of the wheel.

We hobbled the rest of the way into Ness City, stopped for a shake and a burger, and checked into the Derrick Inn — the Derelict Inn, by the look of it. Back in the room, Joe’s bike managed to fall over on its own and bend a tooth on his top front chainring, leaving him to make do with his remaining gears until Pueblo, which suddenly felt like a lifetime away at two hundred and sixty miles. Sixty-four miles closer to it today, at least, and closer to two thousand for the trip as a whole.