Road Trip - Day 19

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Early on the morning of our last day of this loop Joerg loaded up the rented Royal Enfield 411 and headed out for Red Lodge to return the bike.  While he was battling the heat on his journey to Rocky Mountain Moto the rest of us enjoyed a slightly more relaxed start.

Patrick found us a nice route that included a dirt road, but it turned out to be one dirt road too many.  Upon returning to the hard road I discovered a little...squish...in my back wheel.  As I was slowly driving trying to understand this strange feeling, Katherine was scolding me for not keeping up with Patrick and Christian.  I explained to her that I thought I had a problem with my back wheel so she leaned over and called out, "you have a flat tire!".  Mystery solved.

We pulled over, parked the bike, and waited for the guys to realize that I wasn't behind them anymore.  They came back to find me with the flat.  Christian pumped up the tire in order to find the (quite sizable) hole so that we could plug it with a tire patch and be on our way.  The patch worked perfectly and made it possible for me to get the bike back to Great Falls where Patrick had found a tire/bike shop that had my tire...in stock!  The whole adventure added about two hours to our journey, but we made it back to Livingston.


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