Day 46 | Trouble on the way to Burra: Big trouble and a whole lotta luck
48 km | Heading west total: 1,708 km
Some days you can be quite unlucky, some days you can get very lucky and there are rare occasions you can be both.
Today was both.
Having snapped my old chain a few days ago I was surprised when it pinged again going up the steepest bit of today’s ride, which wasn’t particularly steep. Ready for this moment I swapped the old chain over to my new fabulous chain that I had bought in Adelaide but for some reason this new chain kept slipping on the middle ring. That ain’t supposed to happen. While I managed to get into Burra I could only use the top ring or the granny. Umm. I usually use the middle ring about 80% of the time.
No bike shop in Burra, or for that matter, even back in Clare. It’s either heading a couple of days back to Gawler or Port Augusta but now without any spare link. Or maybe there’s one last spare link somewhere in my trailer bag.
This is very bad news for where I was intending to go. That would mean no more off road riding and the rest of the Mawson is on the dirt.
But there was good news.
Very good news.
In the Burra camping ground were 2 cyclists, Garrett and Cleat on a tandem, and also with the same type of Bob trailer, heading Sydney to Perth at pace. I haven’t seen cyclists since that day back after leaving Wellington and before I struggled into Adelaide. Garrett is a bike mechanic by trade, saying immediately that the middle ring is on back to front which is probably my slipping issue but he did have a large supply of spares for the chain and kindly gave me a handful of pins to keep me going until I hit that next bike shop in Melrose.
Very, very good news.