Thurs, 10/23/2025; 7 miles
I AM TOTALLY RESTORED!! Everything on my bike is like new again…like I am starting from scratch! And the weather looks great from here on out. I am SO EXCITED to get back on the road tomorrow! All I have left is getting a working iPhone.
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After a huge hotel breakfast (including a Texas-shaped waffle), I spent the morning at Nate‘s Bicycle Shop, where I was the only customer and got a lot of time from Nate. All my packages from Amazon were there except the used iPhone.
Nate quickly clamped my bike up in the stand, and removed both wheels. He put a brand new Schwalbe Marathon Plus tire on the back wheel, along with a new tube. On the front wheel, he determined that the existing tire was better than the spare I was carrying, so reinstalled that with a new tube.
In addition, he put new sealant in both tubes, and put a tire liner in each tire. Thanks to Ron Solfest for telling me about tire liners from his days in Phoenix. Sure, they add weight, but I am at a point where cost and weight are no object if it prevents those cursed flats.
Nate is pretty confident that I won’t have any more flats from here to Austin. Wouldn’t that be amazing?!
In addition to the tires, he also taught me how to properly lube a chain. (Every day.) And he checked over everything else on the bike to make sure it was working properly.
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Not only did Nate take care of my bike, and receive my packages, he also helped me figure out tomorrow night. The weather forecast calls for up to 2.5 inches of rain in Brackettville, the very town I’ll be staying in tomorrow night. It will be the first rain in over 40 days, ao they are predicting floods in the Hill country due to dry ground. I do NOT want to be in a tent tomorrow night.
It just happens that Nate is a personal friend of someone who manages the hotel on the old Fort Clark army base in Brackettville. So he called her and she assured him that she would have room for me. That was a great relief to me, especially since it’ll be a Friday night.
II had actually considered staying a third night here in Del Rio, because of that massive rain storm approaching, in addition to these very strong headwinds. But now that I know I have a place to stay, I can tackle the headwinds. They will be very strong, like 16-18 mph from the south east, but I only have to go 32 miles and have all day to do it. So even if I average 7.5 mph, it will still be only about four hours in the saddle.
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I took advantage of Nate’s Bike Shop’s location, and left my bike there to walk over to H-E-B and CVS to get some supplies. I don’t think I’d want to leave a bike out front in a town this size, and it’s awkward to roll it inside (although I do that when I have to).
Then I went back to the hotel to wait for the iPhone to arrive, and used that time to write some postcards and study the maps and do some re-organizing.
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Nate texted me at 2pm to let me know that my used iPhone had arrived from Amazon! Yay! But I still had to wait for the case. When that came in too, I hauled my bike out out of the hotel one last time.
On the way to Nate‘s, I stopped at a different bike shop, Zen Bikes, to get a patch kit, because Nate didn’t have any. At Zen, I met a guy who had texted me a few days ago after meeting the Adventure Cycling group, Dan King! Dan is also bicycling the Southern Tier, and is going the same direction as I am.
He started in Phoenix, and has had 22 flats since then. TWENTY-TWO!! I thought I was suffering with a small handful of flats. I think I would go crazy with that many.
Dan was going to try to meet me at Panda Express, but he didn’t make it in time. As soon as I finished eating, I had to get back to the hotel room and get my iPhone transfer working, since I knew it would take a long time.
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Transferring everything from my broken iPhone 17 to my newly acquired used iPhone 16 was harder than I had expected. When I signed into the hotel yesterday, I didn’t pay the extra $5 for the faster Internet. That turned out to be a mistake — just downloading the optional iOS upgrade (which I shouldn’t have accepted) took over an hour.
At one point, after some googling, I aborted the whole thing to start over. But when it started again, it continued the iOS download. So I just had to wait.
After several starts and stops, I finally got to the point at 9 PM, after four hours of work, where it said it would take eight hours to finish transferring the data. So I guess that would be 5 AM, which would be okay.
Both phones were unusable at that point, of course, so I just went to bed, hoping for the best. What could go wrong? <Insert scary music here.>
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TRANSLATIONS/BACKGROUND: “TEXBIRD” = Texas Bike Ride, my own nickname for the 800 miles in the middle of Southern Tier Bicycle Route, from El Paso to Austin, using maps from ACA (Adventure Cycling Association). This will complete my ride of the Southern Tier from the Pacific Ocean (San Diego) to the Atlantic Ocean (Jacksonville). (I biked the 1500 miles from Austin to Jacksonville in March 2024, and the 1000 miles from San Diego to El Paso in February 2025.)
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LINKS:
Old-fashioned BLOG if you have friends who don’t use Facebook:
“Old Scouter” Facebook page if you want to follow big adventures with more pictures and video clips (but not unrelated personal posts):
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100066334039590
“Old Scouter” YouTube page (when I get time to edit after the trip):