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Monday 4 February 2013

Not so cold in Colchester

So, to Colchester again. Last time I went to the south of Colchester, intending to work towards the town centre; this time I started in the north, with the same intention.

Man proposes, rubber disposes. I'd gone about half a kilometer, when I realised that the bumping feeling that I was getting as I travelled along, probably wasn't bumpiness in the road. So I got off the bike and had a good look at the back wheel, expceting to find, I don't know, maybe a kink in the rim? What I did find, though, was a bulge in the tire where the inner tube was pushing the anti-puncture internal liner through a honking great hole in the tire.

I had a little think, and decided that it would be pushing my luck to ride the bike like this. So I biked back to the car, thinking, I'll find a bike shop. I looked at the map, and decided where a Halfords would be likely to be located, and I headed for there. And blow me! There *was* a Halfords in exactly the place I thought it might be. I took the bike in, and splashed out on a new back tire (£25, kevlar armoured and puncture resistant). fitting it (£7, because I thought that if I did it myself, it would take me an hour or two, because although I did have bike tools with me, I don't have the top-flight tools that they have in Halfords), and they were able to fix it in 20 minutes. While I waited, I wandered around the shop, and added a top quality U-shaped bike lock to the bill.

I took the bike back to the car, drove half a mile or so, parked, and did my tour of Colchester from there.

There were some cracking caches, too. One was an excellently made fake bolt, there were a couple of fake metal plates and I did two excellent multis that I'd always wanted to attempt. I also had DNFs on a couple of caches that I've DNFed before.

So a total of 26 caches today, plus a new tire!

2 comments:

  1. The speed at which things are changing in the world never ceases to amaze me. Once Kevlar was only found in high spec military applications, now you find it in bike tyres.

    Looks like your ability to sniff out cache locations is extended to sniffing out bike shops. A useful ability.

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  2. Ladysolly pointed out that I could have done it more reliably using an app that I already have on the iPhone. But then I don't get the fun of guessing "where's the Halfords"

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