Day 31 – 05/3/2012 – Oklahoma City, OK
The day was later known as the Fat Tire Drama, Part 1.
We went out of the hotel at 11 because we needed to rest a little bit more that day due to our lack of sleep in previous nights. We had an intense 25 miles under the hot sun. During that time we passed several Native American counties or “Nations”, as they call them. When we arrived to a small city called Shawnee and found a Subway to have lunch. We stopped for about an hour and a half in the hope the temperatures would go down somewhat before we would move on. That, of course, didn’t happen.
Everything was going well until I noticed my front tire was flat. We stopped in the side of a road and fixed it quite quickly, but a small part of the tube got stuck in between the wheel and the border to the tire and it blew as soon as we started inflating it. So we took it out and used the second spare tube we had. This whole thing took almost 45 minutes, but this time it seemed to be holding fine so we moved on.
Not too long after we left we noticed the tire was flat again. We stopped and took the tube out again, fixed with a patch and inspected the tire for anything sticking inside one more time. Again we couldn’t find anything, so we assembled the bike again and moved on. Due to the delay in fixing the tire we arrived in a small city called McLoud around 9pm instead of 7pm as we had planned. We stopped to get something to eat since it was completely dark already and we still had 28 miles to go.
Since there was nothing else to eat anywhere else at that time we agreed to eat some sandwiches of questionable appearance and no expiration date printed on the pack. When we went out of the station, we saw my front tire was flat again.
We unassembled the whole thing one more time and started fixing it. That was when a police car stopped b to check if we wanted some help. We had extra patches and a nice pump which we used to, one more time fix the tire. Again we inspected carefully looking for something that could be causing it to get flat, but found nothing.
We moved on from McLoud and about 10 minutes later a police car with lights on stopped behind us and signaled for us to stop. A police man came out and gave us two transparent safety glasses since ours were sunglasses, not appropriate to ride at night. He said the Sargent that had helped us before had sent them to us. We accepted them, and the police went back to his car. Before leaving, he used the loud speaker on his car and said “looks good!”. That was really funny. Then, better protected, we kept pedaling… but unfortunately, not for long.
About 5 miles down the road my front tire was flat one more time. It was past 1:00am already. We looked for the only source of light coming from a lamp hanging on an electric line and one more time fixed it. This time, however, we found the culprit: a small piece of metal that was hidden in the rubber. We finally removed it, inflated the tube, assembled the panniers and kept moving on. The road was totally dark and hilly, but due to the late hours there was close to no traffic.
When I least expected a shaded figure crossed the road right in front of us very quickly. I couldn't see what it was at first, but when we advanced a few more meters we passed side by side with it and I saw it was a wolf! Fortunately it was alone. It just looked at us and ran back to the forest without trying to chase us or anything.
About two hours later we entered the Southeast side of Oklahoma City. It was about 3:00am so all avenues were empty and riding at night, despite of being very tired, was very pleasant. We were hungry but there was nothing opened at that time. The only place opened with anything to eat that vaguely approximated food was McDonalds. Due to the circumstances we were forced to eat there.
On our way to the planned hotel we checked several others in the hope of finding one with a similar rate that wouldn’t require us to keep pedaling but all of the were either full or much more expensive.
We got to our hotel at 4:00am. Then we showered, washed clothes and prepared to sleep as quickly as we could. That was quite a rough day, but still I liked it a lot!