More spoke issues -May 18th

1 broken spoke, 53 miles - totals: 61 burgers, 8 broken spokes, 12 states, 2230kms

I was right when I said that starting again after our long break would be tough - we only set off after many hours of sorting, and a great breakfast (again many thanks to Tom) at 11.20am. We made it a mile and a half, before exactly the same thing as had happened to Alex, happened to me. We thought that it would be good to have the same bikes because our problems will be the same, and they have been - but the problem is that whenever we get one problem, we are almost guaranteed to get two. Another bit of copycat problems came this morning - both of our pumps are broken - after not much use. Luckily Tom had a spare and very good one, which we hope will treat us well for the rest of the trip.

My chain got caught in the wheel, which ripped up my spokes - as happened to Alex last week, and one spoke even broke on the impact. We limped back to the bike shop that had rebuilt Alex's wheel (twice) - Big Shark Bicycles of St Louis - and asked them very nicely if they would do the same to mine! Luckily they weren't busy, and they fixed my wheel while we enjoyed a reviving hot chocolate from Starbucks. Apparently the problem came because the derailleur may have been bent a bit which puts the gears out of line so we sorted that out too. We eventually set off again at 2.20pm, 3 hours later after a quick check back at the house to see if Alex's parcel had arrived (it hadn't).

We then cycled 15 miles up to the Katy Trail before heading west along it - along the banks of the Missouri River. The Katy Trail is a converted railroad - that has had tightly packed, small gravel poured over it. Many thanks to Megan who helped us find it - it made the start of today a lot easier than it could have been - tired and wet and frustrated as we were. We were tired and frustrated by having to fix bikes, and wet because of the flooding we had to go through to get to the Katy Trail - where all others turned back, we had no option but to plough through a deep section of flooding - having a great time in the process, but soaking everything below the level of a foot and a half.

We then had a casual 35 miles up to Marthasville on the trail, going at a decent pace, and arriving at just after 7. We are now camped beside a baseball pitch where there has been a competition all evening - the annoying thing is that we haven't yet got to sleep - the floodlights are still on.