Quairading to Beverley 1995

Quairading to Beverley, day 9, Friday 3 November 1995.

The Miracles of Beverley

I enjoyed the do-it-yourself breakfast in the hotel and left Quairading at 8:00. The morning was cool and sunny with light SE winds. This day should have been a ‘doddle’ but I found it unexpectedly hard and slow, as though I still had headwinds or was going forever uphill.

Beverley

I was now in range of the ABC-FM transmitter which is located nearby, and at one stage was delighted with Handel’s ‘Zadoc the Priest’ in full stereo. It was a week since I had had a musical ‘fix’ so I had a strong emotional reaction to this music, which is one of my favourites. The chords and harmonies, the shifts from major to minor and the final climax are always very moving.

I rested at 3241, 3255 and 3268. At 3262 the pedal crank started to work loose from the shaft. This has been an intermittent problem since I had to replace the whole thing in early 1995. I am reluctant to bang it on too firmly because I need to get it off sometimes. Anyway, it might still work loose. With the socket wrench I tightened the nut, it was fixed in a minute and I got on my way.

The chain came off again during a too-quick gear change to ‘fastest’ at 3271. I got my hands black again.

I reached Beverley at 11:23, 3279. The room in the old hotel had no bathroom or flyscreens or TV, but it was only $18 and it was clean and freshly painted. The shared bathroom was right next door, and I had easy access to the back upstairs verandah, where I put my bike.

I bought some drinks, breakfast food and barley-sugar for the next day’s possibly gruelling effort, put my drinks and perishables in the fridge in the common area, had lunch and a rest, then showered and changed and strolled out for the usual routine. On the way out I checked the back tyre again, to find that it had actually split and the inner tube was bulging through the crack.

This was the first miracle – that it had got me to Beverley without blowing out on that rough road. The road was sealed but many sealed country roads are surfaced with large sharp stones, and because the roads are little used it takes years for the surfaces to smooth down.

If I had taken the road to York, adding an extra 15km to my journey, that tube would certainly have blown out and left me with either a long and difficult walk or the humiliating acceptance of a lift, had there been any vehicles and had any of them been willing to take me.

The tube must have been within a few hundred metres of blowing out. There had been only one car on the road since the Beverley turnoff, 26 km back. I could have been stuck out there with a long walk and no option.

I checked the front tyre as well. The tread was all right but the wall was weakened so that the tube was starting to bulge through in many places right around.

The state of the tyres explained why what should have been an easy fast ride had been so sluggish and difficult. The state of the front one also explained why the odometer seemed to be reading low all the way from Quairading, even though it had been absolutely accurate when checked against 5km posts on the first two days of the ride, and nothing had changed.

I knew I could go no further on the back tyre, and felt that my ride had come to an end, or at least to a major delay. I quickly went to the local Co-op and looked at their stock of tyres. They had none of my size, 27 X 1.25, in stock. But they said that the Beverley Trading Company might have some.

This was the second miracle – that there were two shops in that small town stocking bike tyres, and that, yes, they had exactly two tyres of the right size in stock. They were 27 inch, the right diameter, but a bit smaller than the tubes, at 1 and one eighth inch wide. But I decided they could be used and bought them.

I decided to use a new thornproof tube for the back wheel – I had one with me, there were no right-size tubes in the shops. The old tube showed wear where it had been blistering through the tyre. I got the tyre and tube on and pumped up in 10 minutes.

The lady who ran the hotel kept turning up. She appeared in a dressing gown with a towel round her head and told me that had she known my tyres were worn out, she would have got me some more when she had gone in to York that afternoon. Had I checked the tyres as soon as I arrived in Beverley, and had it occurred to me to go whining to the hotel management about them, this would have been helpful. I thanked her and told her I had managed to get the last two tyres of the right size in the whole of Beverley, and that I was grateful for my luck, which I didn’t deserve. In future I will always fit new tyres just before a trip, and get only proper quality ones.

The front wheel was the problem. It was a newly built light-weight strong alloy wheel I had ordered specially, and they don’t make things like that in widths greater than 1 inch. I had got a 1.25 inch tyre and tube on it with no trouble, but trying to get a 1 and one eighth tyre and a 1.25 inch thornproof tube onto a 1 inch wheel caused me to puncture the tube. I tried again with the old but still sound tube off the back wheel and punctured it, too.

Finally I got a new, thin cheap tube that I had with me and put it on, with the tyre. I pumped it up hard and quickly went for my walk, ‘phone calls and look round the town. I booked the Travellers’ Rest Motel in Mundaring for the next day. I had been mulling over this ambitious scheme for a few days and knew that I would end up doing it.

Before going in to dinner I checked the tyres again – they were both still hard, as they were all evening. The dinner was soup, steak with Mexican sauce and sweets. It was not quite as good as last time in Beverley (1989) but still good, and the bottomless percolated coffee was excellent.

The lady told me that I would have no trouble making an early start because the other guests were truckies who had a similar need. They went to bed early, leaving me in charge of the TV in the guest lounge. I enjoyed the Friday programs while fixing numerous holes in the two punctured tubes with all my supply of patches. This meant that for the next day’s hike I would have one new tube (a special self-repairing, puncture-proof one) plus two repaired ones in case the ones on the bike went flat under stress, due to damage by me. but they were still hard when I took my walk round the town before going to bed.

Reading at Beverley: 3279. Aggregate: 446. Km for day: 53 (expected 54 – worn tyre problem?). Km/day: 50. Speed to Beverley: 15.8 kph.

Quairading to Beverley 1995

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