I patched the tire and got Sam the bike, on the train. When we got to Bellingham, the tire was flat again. I patched it and headed to Tom's house where it went flat again. Twice. I put in a new tube and that held until I hit some glass on the way to Anacortes. I put in another new tube and that one held until yesterday. I borrowed a floor pump to put more air in the tire and about twenty miles down the road, bang, the tube blew. That's when I noticed that the sidewalk of the tire had a gash in it, probably from the glass I hit in Anacortes, which is why the tube blew.
Luckily, I had an emergency tire boot, basically, a thick sticky piece of plastic to put inside the tire over the cut to prevent the inner tube from ballooning through the gash and popping.
I've been carrying a couple of tire boots in my repair kit since my Rocky Mountain tour back in '98 when a fellow cyclist told me his flat tire blues story about a cut side wall and gave me a couple of extra tire boots he had. In a pinch, a tire can also be booted with paper money or an energy bar wrapper but a real boot is safer, something I really appreciated on the long downhill off the pass I was on. I bought a new tire in Okanagan, hopefully ending my tire troubles. So, my count so far is seven flats, four tubes, and one tire in only a couple of hundred miles.
-- Post From My iPhone
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