Friday, May 4, 2012

Day 47 - D'Iberville, MS to Dauphin Island, AL

I woke up to donuts! Jerry and Michele went out and bought donuts to go with our tamales for breakfast. What a treat.

I plotted a route out if town that would keep us off of US90 for the first 15 miles or so, I thought this would be more pleasant, but I was wrong. The road was nice enough, although there was no shoulder and a fair amount of traffic, but that wasn't the problem. Jerry managed to run over a price of beer bottle that put a pretty good size cut in his tire. We replaced the tube and I used a Park quick patch to cover the hole on the inside of the tire.

I've found that while the Park quick patches often don't patch tubes very well, they do a great job repairing the inside of a tire. What's the word for something that doesn't do what it was designed to do very well, but is great at something else? I don't know.

A couple of miles down the road Jerry flatted gain. We couldn't find anything in the tire so we suspect that the tube was bad, either not repaired from an earlier flat or it had been repaired poorly, well figure that out later. This time both the tire an the tube were replaced, just to be safe. Payback, I suppose, for not having any flats yesterday. The second flat occurred on a narrow road and Jerry had to work in a small strip between speeding cars and a swamp. Michele looked out for gators and I watched traffic.

Once again it rained on us all day, even though the forecast only called for isolated thunderstorms. I guess they were isolated over us. My ortlieb panniers have done a great job of keeping everything dry, but Jerry and Michele's panniers are not water proof so their stuff keeps getting wet. Michele says she will go with ortlieb if they ever do another long tour. I'm happy with them, but more pockets or dividers would be nice.

Lunch was a problem, I was starting to bonk as we rode into Grand Bay, but there was nowhere to eat unless we wanted to ride out to I-10, and we didn't. We ended up at a Circle K with a Pizza Inn inside. I remember we used to go to the Pizza Inn in South Africa when we wanted American style pizza, this one was okay and it served its purpose, but the pre-made personal sizes pizzas will not bring back such fond memories.

The rain cleared about 15 miles before we arrived in Dauphin Island so we got to ride over the bridge under sunny skies. The bridge wasn't difficult, but there were broken bottles and even carpet tacks all over the shoulder, no flats, but we'll see how the tires hold up on Monday.

When we arrived at our B&B we found out that the rains of the last few days have resulted in quite a bit of flooding around here. Yesterday the roads on the western half of the island were not passable. Everything looks okay today, if a little wet.

We're staying at the Dauphin Island Inn and it's really nice, right on Mobile Bay. Lori and Dean are still here, they decided to take their rest day here instead of Pensacola so we all went out for BBQ together and exchanged stories.

1 comment:

  1. Serendipity - that's the term you were looking for!

    ReplyDelete