The title of this post is “Our First Flat Day,” so you might be thinking, “Oh, so they just had a nice, easy ride along the Missouri riverbank without any hills. Good for them.” I wish that were the case too, but that’s not quite what I mean by a flat day. Now, I remember shortly before we left on this trip, a past spokes member told us that we’d better get really good at changing flat tires because we’d have to deal with a lot of them. Well, nearly a month into our trip, we had yet to get a single flat. On a scale from 1 to 10, our tires were about as flat as Shenandoah National Park. We were starting to wonder what last year’s team had done wrong to get so many flats. Were they riding behind a truck carrying tacks the whole way or something? Little did we know, things would soon change.
Our ride began like any other. We split into two groups and pedaled our bikes wherever google maps told us to go. Not ten minutes into our ride, my phone started to ring, and I heard that Leah, who was with the other group a short distance ahead of us, had gotten the first flat of Spokes 2019. Since our car wasn’t too far away, Evan drove back to give us a bike pump and a pair of tire levers to change the tube. I guess we were bound to get a flat at some point, but we were still a little sad that we had broken our perfect streak.
Later that day, Edgardo, Bill and I were riding through a town when I heard someone call out my name. I turned my head and saw the other group staring down at another flat tire in the garage of an auto mechanic. It turned out Erin had gotten flat number two for the team, and the auto mechanic was nice enough to let us borrow their pump which was much faster than my hand pump.
The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful except for some more shuttling to avoid bridges closed due to flooding. Bill, Edgardo, and I were almost to the destination, and we were a little too proud that the other group had received both flats of the day while our tires were still completely filled with air, when out of nowhere, a pothole jumped in front of Bill’s tire and brought him to a stop. While I did have a handheld pump, we realized that not one of us had packed a pair of tire levers, so we called Leah and asked her to bring us some since she wasn’t too far away. In the meantime, we pushed, pulled, and pried at the tire with our bare hands, and because we were the far better group, we were able to get a new tube in before the car even showed up.
After such a long day, we all needed a big meal to help us unwind, so we stopped by Pappy’s Smokehouse to gorge ourselves on some delicious St. Louis-style ribs. As if that weren’t enough, we headed to Ted Drewes for their world-famous frozen custard. All in all, it wasn’t such a bad day.
