Ride to Sustain is on the road again, and in style! Abby has gone back to real life, but we have a new addition; my dad is taking time off his normal 80 hour week of saving the world to come for a ride. Also, our custom riding jerseys have arrived (see pic) and we finally feel like we look professional. However the guys at Celsias appear to have taken the shirt making as a contest and are going to try and put my design to shame - the winner gets their design sported on all remaining TV interviews (not to be a defeatist, but I am betting on them... it's not fair they have a real design team and I've got, well; me).

Anyway, we finally left Boulder, CO behind. It was tough to leave. We got to interview some amazing people, see old friends, make new ones and catch some much needed rest. It took a while to work out the kinks from our time off and it was 102 degrees out today; an extension of the record breaking heat wave that has been sweeping north america this summer. Despite this, it felt good to be back on the road. In fact, I spent the whole day thinking what a great, positive entry I'd be writing tonight. Yes, it's true, I spend my time on the bike daydreaming about blog entries... I have issues.

These good vibes lasted until twenty miles from our destination of Akron, CO when I pulled a few feet off the road to film a cattle feedlot. For those of you who are not familiar with these magical places, cattle get sent to feedlots for 30 days before slaughter to get fattened up. Unfortunately there are a lot of issues (PDF) with water pollution from feedlot runoffs not to mention the large amounts of methane and CO2 that cows put off. A couple of worthy articles on why we should be eating lower on the food chain can be found here, and here.

As I packed up the camera and hopped back on my bike I noticed by back tire was flat; always a bummer. I went to swap in one of the 10 spare tubes I picked up in Boulder and realized that I had purchased ones with the wrong nozzle for my wheels. This was not a good sign, I had 10 useless new tubes and a few previous flat tyres I had not thrown out. Jon and John had gotten a few miles ahead, and my dad has much thinner wheels than me, and as I reached for the phone to call them I realized I had no phone... it was sitting in a gas station 10 miles back. The day was looking better and better. I ended up patching the first tube of my life (didn't know that I had a patch kit) and hopping back on.

I made it a few feet before I realized I was just scratching the surface of my tire problems. Both my front wheel and trailer tire were loaded with prickers, and when I pulled each out it opened up a new leak. I spent an hour or two patching tubes, fetched the phone which was amazingly where I had left it and headed down the home stretch, now three hours later at the same point I had started patching tires. I was just never meant to reach Akron, because I got three more flats in those last 20 miles. I walked my bike a good chunk of it, and wound up limping into town five hours later with a total of 5 patches on my three tires and two more on ones I had thrown out. Fate is not without a cruel sense of irony; this is the first small town I have hit on the whole trip with its own bike shop. So tomorrow I am getting loaded up on extra thick tubes and we're going to see if we can help my dad knock off his first 100 mile day.

Note: Interview/itinerary suggestions for the trip can be emailed to me.