Time in Saddle: 6:50
Distance for the Day: 62.73 miles: From Overton Beach To Mesquite, NV
Accumulated Trip Distance: 1087.4 miles
Altitudes: Starting/Ending 1317’/1600’ Highest: 2170’, Accumulated: 2697’
Speeds: Avg: 9.1 mph, Max: 33.1 mph
Weather: Clear, still windy, but only 10-15 out of the north
Expenditures: $94
Got up, ate a quickie cold breakfast, and saw that my starboard-front tire had gone flat, again (Demitol!) It seemed, this time, to have been caused by the plastic “rim tape” (a strip of tape which protects the inner-tube from the ends of the spokes which are inside the wheel’s rim) which got folded and creased when I remounted the “fixed” original flat the night before. There were two punctures, kind of like a vampire bite, which I tried to patch with a single patch. This flat occurred at the Accumulated Trip Distance of 1038.9. A few more miles up the road, and the patch failed, and my starboard-front tire went flat, *again*. Hokay! No more fooling around, this time: I replaced the inner-tube with one of the spares I carry, and hoped that the creased plastic rim tape wouldn’t bite the new tube, too. Entered Overton at almost noon, and got lunch at the restaurant, Sugars ($16 for a mushroom burger, fries, and soda – kinda pricey, but goood). Then looked for a cycle shop, but Overton is too small to have a dedicated one. The local hardware store had some cycle stuff, but nothing as exotic as rim tape. I called up and consulted my trike dealer, Steve, to see what he thought about using a folded piece of duct tape as rim tape, and he thought it should work as a temporary solution, so I bought a new spare inner-tube and a small roll of duct tape ($13), and used it for rim tape. We continued from Overton up Hwys 169 and 15 into the lower-left corner of Utah, when it started to get dark. We were now in the town of St. George, and I went into the local Office Depot and bought the Delorme StreetAtlas mapping software for my computer ($65). I asked if the store could help me install the software (my notebook has no CD/DVD drive), but they didn’t have a computer they could use for such an operation, so I’d have to wait to find one. It was getting late in evening, and since we were in a fairly large town, we thought we’d try a local church, which, being so close to Utah, happened to be Mormon. They were very nice, and willing to let us camp out on one of the lawns of their somewhat large campus. The bishop there asked us if we knew about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and talked with us a bit to see if we were interested, which we weren’t really; Eusebio begged-off using his poor English as an excuse, and I must have looked like a case-hardened soul, already, so he didn’t even bother much with me. But, to his credit, he still let us stay the night on his church’s lawn, and for that, we were grateful. I had another weird dream that night which included my friends Dave R and David L, plus some young woman who I didn’t know, and never saw before. Dave was piloting a small plane, and I was showing them my new GPS watch, which showed buildings and objects as we were passing them by (we must have been flying low!) Dave pulled up into a steep climb, and I dropped the watch, seeing it fall onto someone’s lawn (I must have had the eyes of an eagle). A woman came out from the house and picked it up, and took it inside. Dave landed the plane just up the street, and I went to the house to retrieve the watch. The woman was strange, somehow (I don’t remember exactly how), but she gave me back the watch, and I extracted myself from her presence. Sleeping on a concrete walkway will give you dreams like this – you should try it – it’s very therapeutic. (I could have slept on the grass, but didn’t want my stuff to get wet.)
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