An Interesting Bike Ride

Today is 'Mother's Day' so Evelyn asked if she could come along on a bike ride.  I got the bikes on the back-bumper-bike-rack.  We got all the gear we thought we would need, including a new package-shelf-seat-post-add-on for Evelyn's bike.  It was the same one that I rode across the USA with back in 2004.  Turns out it is designed for a fatter seat-post but we put some folded up paper to cushion it so it clamped hard enough to work.

So, we headed out to Horseshoe Park unloaded the bikes geared-up and set out down the Neuse River Trail.

We got 16km down the trail and there was this very loud 'BANG'.  It was the rear tire on Evelyn's bike.  An amazing blow-out right in the middle of the tire.  When I looked in the inside of the tire after taking it off it looked like it had a cut in the inside.

A nice fellow 'Cliff' stopped and helped us change the tire.  I had to use my spare 'folding-tire' since it was not just the inner tube but the tire itself that blew out.  The first new inner tube I tried was one left over from a previous flat tire and I finally figured that out and switched to my (last) good extra inner tube and pumped up the tire to around 100psi (it is supposed to run at 120psi) and everything seemed fine.

Rather than continue down the trail we decided that this was a good 'turn-around' point and headed back up the Neuse River Trail to the Horseshoe Farm parking lot.  Here are the specifics of the ride:

17.2 km .... total distance
14.8 kph ... average speed
33.8 kph ... max speed
01:07:22 ... hh:mm:ss

And here is a picture of Evelyn and Cliff after we got the tire fixed.