Day 277
We woke up to yet another flat tire. Chopper’s back tire just wouldn’t hold air. But suspecting a slow leak Chopper pumped it up, and we started the day. 15 km later, we had to make a pit stop to pump it up again – it went soft almost immediately. Another 15 km down the road, Chopper could no longer tolerate the incompetent performance of the semi soft tire anymore, so we decided to fix it up once for all. Chopper was using self-adhesive patches and he noticed that it was an earlier patch that was failing. Suspecting either that the tube wasn’t clean enough or the patch was old he mended both. First he removed the old patch and cleaned the glue off with naphtha, also called white-gas from our stove, then to be thorough cleaned off that with soap and then water, then he applied a new patch we purchased in Townsville.
Only 30 km in we stopped for lunch. I had a handful of pretzels dipped in honey, and Chopper had the 5 pieces of bread left, made into 2 and half peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Thankfully the rest of the ride was splendid culminating with the ride into Marlborough, which is nestled in among the mountains along a long sweeping road. Still hungry after our paltry lunch, we arrived in Marlborough, we were gorging down burgers by 3:30pm.
We chose to stay at the Marlborough Hotel Grounds, and although we didn’t take advantage of the free stay with a meal we did take advantage of cheap ice-cold beers. We found a shady spot under a large tree to avoid the morning dew that has been plaguing us and hoped to wake up with all of our tire still filled with air.
That damn DEW!!!!!!