On Monday, May 7, 2018 at 7:02:00 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 5/7/2018 9:28 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Monday, May 7, 2018 at 4:39:31 PM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:

And what do you do for the front? Bikes have two wheels. Call your wife
from the hospital that dinner is off tonight, and the next 10-20 days?

Wow, you're a nervous nelly. And what about the front? We're talking about a rear wheel and a casing scuff. If it were on the front tire, I'd keep an eye on it. I've ridden front tires booted with a $1 bill for many, many miles.

On our coast-to-coast tour, my daughter got a gash over 1/2" in the
front tire of her Terry bike. That bike has an odd size front wheel.
Late Saturday in South Dakota, there was absolutely no way to get a
replacement tire. Ditto Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... The best
we could do was to call Terry Inc. on Monday and get it quick-shipped to
the next bike shop on our route, which was well over a hundred miles away..

On the road, I triple-booted the tire and we ran low pressure the rest
of that day. In the motel, I stitched the gash back together as well as
I could, re-did the internal boots, and rode the tire all those miles to
that bike shop.

I guess Joerg would have taken a taxi?

No, Joerg's tire would have exploded violently, blowing his body parts all over the road. He would have been mailed home in a giant Ziplock bag. Mundane mechanical failures are catastrophic, life endangering events for Joerg.

BTW, you guys sure did go north. I was further south on the Bikecentennial alignment through Colorado, Kansas and then Missery. It was an unremarkable trip from a tire standpoint except that the locals always wanted to know how many tires we had gone through. It was the question right after "where are you from." The only memorable part tire-wise was buying a couple Michelin tubes that I couldn't get to hold a patch. The mold release was nasty, and I had to sand the hell out of them to get anything to stick. I still have my first-generation Specialized folding Turbo spare from that trip -- which I never had to use and couldn't use now because its a 27" -- because that's what was more available back then (and Schrader valves).

-- Jay Beattie.