The title pretty much says it all when describing yesterday. Going into it, we knew it would be a rough day. There was a killer climb right away in the morning and Jeff had battled some residual sickness effects the night before. Pulling out of our campsite, I had a flat front tire. Filled it up, all seemed to be fine.
The climb was killer, about ten solids miles of climb...hard, but doable. Often, what makes hard climbs bearable is that there usually is an intensely fun and fast downhill on the other side to look forward to. In this case we had no such reward. It just flattened out a little bit, with a few barely noticeable downhills leading to a very wide flat plains. It as overcast and cold all day and once we got out onto the flat plain, there was a constant and strong headwind the whole way... :(
On top of that, one of the of the twisty turvy curves, there was a semi behind me for about a quarter mile and I could tell he was getting a little impatient. He was really close over my left shoulder and half out of courtesy and half out of personal safety, I pulled off onto the shoulder. I realised too late that I pulled right into a patch of thorns. Sure enough, two flat tires, not a half mile down the road. I stopped, patched up a few holes after realising that the spare tube I had wouldn´t fit as a few bike experts had assured me. There were more holes than the eye could see of course, so I resorted to limping into town, stopping to fill up my tires every five miles or so for the last 40 miles...not pleasant at all.
Coming into a town just as it was getting dark and cold, not as far as we wanted to go, with two flat tires that needed some serious fixing, we realised that there were not any hotels, just rooms for rent and for more than we wanted to pay. We didn´t have a choice. I spent about 3 hours patching tubes and pulling thorns out of my tires with a tweezers last night and this morning. But they seem to be holding up very well today, at least.
Today, we hope to maybe right as far as we can and hope to arrive in La Paz tomorrow afternoon. Carnaval is in full swing, so we are looking forward to that!
Four more days of riding then we´ll be on the beach! :)
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