KABOOM!!!

Dominic had been having trouble with one of his tires. It was bulging out on one side. So we tried the old trick of wrapping a dollar bill around the tube and then pumping it up. This failed (we lost our dollar) so we tried some stiffer paper.

This seemed to work until suddenly, KABOOM!!!!! Dominic's tube explodes. We're talking major, irreparable damage.


Spare tubes you ask? Well, Nick had already flatted twice and the valve stem on Gretta's tube had suffered some mysterious damage, rendering it useless. We had made it 10 km, but with no way to repair our huge explosion, we were truly stuck. So we headed down the road to camp out.

The rains came, the tides rose, and we hunkered down for two days to try and wait out the storm. Just a convenient excuse to come up with a new formula, inspired by the railroad track nearby. R = RxRxR. Rain = Rest, Relaxation, and Repair. Perhaps not mathematically sound (R=R^3?), but it worked for us. This is what the lake separating us from the town of Baddeck across the way looked like, during the stormy weather we had to endure.

Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures

Truth be told, we were pretty stuck now. There were no food sources nearby (just what we'd brought along), and the closest bike shop was some 50 km away. We spent two days like this. With resources dwindling we had to be high on resourcefulness. Our first attempt at repair involved a delicate surgery to move part of the valve stem off of the old, exploded tube, onto Gretta's valve-impaired but otherwise good tube:

We made an incision in the tube and extracted the valve piece

This piece was then added to Gretta's tube by making an incision in the back of it under the stem, and then patching the hole. This worked momentarily, but Dominic's tire was too far gone, and the tube exploded again.

So, we have three bikes, but only 5 functional wheels. What to do...

Ah ha! An idea is sprung, and our workshop in the woods springs to life.

Our final product? You wouldn't believe it, but a sort of makeshift tandem bicycle, or a bicycle built for two! Look closely at those bikes now...

Up on the highway again, we put this machine to the test, but were disappointed to find that it was impossible to keep it balanced. A normal tandem bike only has one pivot point (the front steering), but this one had two: both sets of handlebars moved. This led to a phenomenon where when the front bike turned, the weight on the back bike shifted and threw everything out of whack. We made it not more than 10 feet this way.

God's Work: A Series of Door Openings and Closings

God never closes a door without opening another, so the saying goes. But the reverse is also true, we are finding. It's been one series of door openings and closings after another. Seems like dull work, but the fun is seeing how we respond in between. The tandem bike (engineered by Dominic and Gretta) was ingenious, but the laws of physics made it impossible to ride. But when that door closed, along came another open door: the door to a friendly neighbor's truck, who loaded us up, and took us into Sydney.



By the time you read this post, we will hopefully be gone. Hopefully we will have solved Nick's knee problem, and we are hoping to get warm and dry. Hey, maybe the sun will even have come out!