(no subject)
so i should have known it was going to bad from the start.
i was going to meet my new friends kristi and roni at krisi's place downtown at 6, i figure 20 minutes is plenty of time to get from my place to there....wrong! huuge traffic badness at 9th and 9th where they've closed the intersection and all kinds of madness. so i get there like 15 minutes late, and notice my cell phone has a missed call and a voicemail from kristi saying, hey it's 6:15 we're takin' off. so i call kristi and say where are you?! so they're only four blocks away, so i say great, i'll pop my front tire on and be there in a second.
so i hope on my bike and start crusing down the street, when a freight train blocks my path. and we're talking slow and long freight train. so i can basically see roni and kristi on the other side...and it takes like 10 minutes. so i catch up to them and we start ridin' along, and we notice roni has a flat. so we stop to fix it, and it turns out he's got like...5 of these scary looking thorns stuck in his tire, so we break out the patch kit (since he didn't have any tubes (mtn bike w/ slicks sized)) and patch it up. halfway through taking his tire apart, kristi checks his rear tire....also flat...also filled with thorns. roni has now learned that on slicks on does not ride through the grass, even if one is on a mountain bike. so this takes like 45 minutes to get everything back on. and we set off again after returning to kristi's to grab her single speed road bike for roni to ride (narrowly missing getting stuck behind another freight train going like 4 miles per hour).
five minutes later, i hit something sharp (piece of glass maybe?) and get a flat front tire as well. man, so far, best bike trip ever. so we stop to fix it, i get my new tube on there lickity split, but manage to pinch flat it while inflating it...son of a bitch. so another 10 minutes go by while i slap my second backup on there and off we go, though i'm running a little low since i can't get up to the usual 110 psi i run with just a hand pump. so we go maybe another mile and a half...two miles....and i'm introduced to tack weed.
tack weed drops these evil little spur things that remind me of caltrops. sharp as hell and basically impossible to see on the road since they're black. we're riding along, and i think, man, this tire isn't hold that air very well, maybe i should put some more in, so as i slow down and come to a stop, i see this little black nub riding up my tire. i think, that's weird, there shouldn't be anything stuck to my tire. so of course, i pull it off. this little bit of evil plant was, of course, holding the air in my tube, which subsequently came hissing out. so at this point we're running 5 puntured tubes between the three of us, and we're beginning to think that kristi's bikes must be blessed since none of hers had gotten flats.
at this point, roni and kristi ride back to her place to get her truck and bike rack, while i start walking back. i should have turned around at the train.
at least to celebrate our awesome ride we went out to get chinese and beer and then made grasshoppers. and tomorrow i think we're going to see beerfest.