83.20 mi / 6:11:59 time / 13.4 mph avg. / 25.5 mph max. / 1308 ft. climbing
Staying at Smith Lake County Park

The tent held up well enough last night after what seemed like a good bit of rain, but who really knows? I woke to a sunrise I could actually see, packed up camp, and was ready to roll at 8am. Then I noticed a strange clunking noise, and saw that my rear tire was dead flat. Crap. Just when I was starting to think that my fancy tires (Schwalbe Marathon Supreme) were totally worth the money, I got bit. Well, better here in camp than out on the road (since it’s the rear wheel, I have to remove all the bags and flip the bike over). However, when I got the tire off, I saw that it wasn’t a puncture; the valve stem had come right out of the tube! So the good news was that my tires *are* still good. Don’t know what happened to the tube, all I can figure is that the lockring on the stem got loose and somehow the tube was being jerked back and forth inside the tire.

So after that delay, I headed out to face my first real headwinds of the trip (or crosswinds, but never anything behind me). I did the first half of the day on empty backroads to the resort town of Clear Lake where I stopped for lunch and library. Iowa is pretty indistinguishable from Illinois. You have corn on one side of the road, soybeans on the other, roads are straight and mostly flat, and I’ve only been chased by one dog. Well, actually it was the other way around, it was a big dog that sprinted out and easily outpaced my 22mph until it reached the end of its territory, stopped, turned, and barked at me when I finally caught up.

After Clear Lake there was a stretch on US 18, which was fairly annoying once the shoulder disappeared. The Iowa State Bike Map has been helping quite a bit by indicating paved backroads that I can take (although the gravel here is good-quality and perfectly rideable too, just slower). Made it to Algona and while I waited in a long line at Subway, I saw that the sunny skies were finally starting to darken. It wouldn’t be right if I went a whole day without rain, would it?

I rode a couple miles up the road to the unremarkable campground and was able to get my tent pitched before the rain rolled in. After an hour so it stopped, and by then it was dark, so I stood outside for a while watching a pretty amazing lightning show all around me. Then I took a shower which I needed very badly (I think it’s living in wet shoes that makes most of the stink, oh, and I’d been wearing the same clothes for 4 days!), and returned to the tent before the next round of showers. The leaking through the ceiling was back again, but now I think I’ve got the problem solved. They sell a thing called a “Gear Loft” which I assume is just a piece of fabric that you hang by these four loops near the top of my tent, so it’s essentially like a shelf above your head. Well, my new “Gear Loft” is made of plastic sheeting, and it’s more properly a “Water Loft”, but it does the job swimmingly. I’ve got a lot of experience with water dripping through my ceiling, so I knew this was one I could solve!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 12:30 pm and is filed under bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.