If Mary McKillop can do it, so can I. On Thursday, 17 December, at 10:05, and with a howling easterly at my back, I set off for a quick ride from South Perth to board the Rottnest Ferry at C-Shed. At 11:30, safely on the jetty at Rottnest where The Doctor had met Cam and me, I got my bike off the ferry and found I had a flat. Dead flat. Again. So I changed the tube and set out to drink too much for a few days. Being replete with my normal high levels of energy I did not bother to repair the offending tube.
On Saturday, The Doctor & I completed an enjoyable lap of Rottnest, including the lighthouse hill. Later that day I rode from The Doctor’s comfortable Geordie Bay residence to the main settlement to do some shopping, and emerged from the shops to find… the tyre was flat - again. I was not in the mood to patch a tube, so I thought, “What would Ted do?”. I took out the still unrepaired tube and pumped it a bit. With about 10 psi in it, it stayed up for a couple of minutes. OK. Maybe it would last until I got home. So with Ted-like abandon, I replaced one stuffed tube with another, and cycled home. It stayed up. The next morning, it was still hard. Today, three days later (something biblical about that too), on Tuesday 22 December, it is still hard.
Its obviously a miracle! Apparently you need two to qualify for Catholic sainthood, so just one to go.
I am increasingly coming to the belief that your club nickname does not suit you. Why don’t we call you JC instead?
It is indeed the age of miracles. Yesterday I managed to convince Cookie and Spunker that a leisurely* ride out to Reabold Hill then back to Kings Park for coffee was more in the Christmas spirit than the usual Tuesday madness. Of a course a real miracle would be if the howling southerly that blew me into town this morning did an about-face around 4 pm.
*A relative concept. There was nothing leisurely about Spunker’s accelerations up Reabold.
Leisurely is also not a word I’d use to describe the ride along Hay St through West Perth and Subi. Suicidal would probably be slightly more accurate. And this is despite assurances that it was both “easier” and “safer” than the bike path! It is little wonder that my adrenalin was pumping a little by the time we got to Reabold Hill.