Venturing out for the first time - trials and errors
PREFACE:
I left home in my first attempt to travel by bike, camp overnight, and ride out the next day. A 100-mile round trip experience to test out my 1991 GT Tachyon, my clean and shiny new panniers and all the gear stuffed inside. I was an experienced cyclist but this was a whole new kind of riding, and I needed to take my rig out and start seeing where adjustments needed to be made, if any. Within six miles of home I could hear something stuck to my front wheel. I peered over the handlebars and could see a pine needle sitting between the ridges of my tire. I reached down, pulled it off, and heard a dreaded psshhhhhttt, informing me that the needle was not stuck to the surface, but had in fact punctured both the tire and the tube. Dammit. I veered off the bike path, pulled the panniers off, found my tools, pulled out a spare tube… it was the wrong size tube! How could I have made such a rookie mistake? No matter, I’ll just use a patch kit… What? Where’s my patch kit?! Only six miles away from home and I’m already calling Cat to ask for help. I walked the bike with a flat tire, laden with panniers, down the path until finally reaching a point where the path reunited with the road and waited for my saviour to arrive with new tubes. I took off the tire, replaced the tube, and proceeded to put the tire back on. It was too tight. Impossibly tight. I couldn’t get it back on for the life of me. Cyclists eventually stopped to help and I was grateful. They too began to struggle with the tire. Another cyclist stopped. They were using their tire levers to try to get the tire back around the rim and I knew from experience the way they were doing it was likely going to rip my new tube. Sure enough, minutes later the tire lever snapped. It wasn’t my tool and I felt bad for the volunteer. We eventually got the tire in the rim and the cyclists went on their way, leaving me to inflate the tire… which ultimately didn’t inflate because, just as I’d feared, it had been sliced when the “helper” broke his lever. New tube. Struggle with the tire. Inflate. Finished. Finally. Nearly two hours of delay at this point. If I didn’t hurry I could be riding in the dark and seeing that the campground was off the highway, that was not something I was prepared to do. I got back on the road. Five miles later, another flat. I was done. The first delay had set me back far too much and now I knew I had no chance to make it to the campground before dark. Another call to Cat and this time we were loading my bike into the car and heading to the nearest bike shop for some guidance. As it so happened, because of the unusual size of my rims, the assumption that 26” tubes would suffice was wrong. They had been fine on all my rides but once I loaded up the bike with my touring gear the stretched tubes were no longer sufficient. We changed the tubes to 27” and that did the trick. Another trick I learned was to stretch the beading of the tire itself and pulling it back over the rim was no longer such an impossible feat. Knowledge!
Unwilling to admit complete defeat, I had Cat drive me to just outside the campground and I was able to roll in and try again the next day.
I can’t call my first solo cyclocamping experience a complete failure because I learned a lot. I learned that my tubes aren’t the right size - - that’s a big deal! I think I need a checklist for future rides. Things I forgot this time around: Patch kit, cable to charge my phone… maybe that’s it. There are a lot of people at the hike/bike sites. One guy has a cool chair, someone else has an inflatable solar lamp. It’d be nice to have something to drink with dinner aside from water. But that’s not necessary. I’m going to try to ride or part of the way home with a guy named Wesley. Hopefully I can keep up with him. In the meantime, I plan on riding to Leo Carillo again next week, and I’ll be damned if repeated flats derail my ride!
