All Time Low

I crossed the river and set foot in Iowa for the first time, enjoying the slight change in scenery, very lush green bluffs, occasionally with a chunk missing that revealed a shock of red soil. There were technically towns on this ride, but the first few I passed through had been ravaged by a tornado recently enough that many of the houses had hardly been repaired. The first of these I came to, I followed a gravel road that google maps claimed would lead me to town. The gravel turned to dirt, and the dirt turned to a mound of dirt and nothing. Looking back, I think a bridge might have been taken out by the tornado.

I had to backtrack a few miles and take a massive detour to get to the other side of the levy this road and bridge were meant to take me over. Then it was dirt roads for about twenty miles. If I hadn’t struggled enough already (gravel roads are not easy on a bike) cars were zooming past me and leaving me in an asphyxiating cloud of dust. When I saw them coming I would stop, pull over, and cover my face and eyes until they passed. It was that routine. Regardless, my eyes were beginning to ache from the sediment. I pressed on, but of course I got a flat tire! I was aware my rear tire was low on tread. I wanted to replace it back in Iowa City, but there’s a shortage on most bike parts, so I could only replace the worse of the two. Now I had biked an additional 700 miles, so my tire was done for. I replaced it in the blazing sun, choking on dust as trucks zoomed down the gravel road with no regard for me.

I was frustrated and exhausted. I had already decided I was going to go to Glenwood for lunch so I could escape into air conditioning, eat a decent meal, and refill on ice water. It was already almost lunchtime when I got the flat, and by the time I finished it was well passed. I was starving. I rushed on, hot and exhausted. I hung out at a Macdonald’s for about an hour before I decided it was time to press on. I was getting close to Council Bluffs, to a hotel! To a bed with pillows!

Back in Brownsville, as I biked on a gravel road to get to the entrance of the Steamboat Trace, I had noticed, nervously, that my brakes weren’t stopping me quite as well as I’d like, but the Steamboat Trace was flat and the hills I’d gone down in Nebraska were short enough that I didn’t feel the need to use them extensively. When I got to Iowa, however, I was biking the Loess Scenic Byway. Up until Glenwood, where I stopped for lunch, I had been biking beneath these hills, but after Glenwood, I climbed up them until I was finally on top of them. Now the slight nuisance of weak brakes turned very quickly into a life threatening situation. Once I got to the top of these hills, it was miles of constant downhill. So, I stopped to tighten my brake cables and got a closer look. It wasn’t that my brakes were worn down. My front brakes were gone! They weren’t in the bike anymore. I tightened the rear brakes and tried to push on, but there was a sudden drop to the right of the road with no barrier, and cars were speeding around the winding roads without much regard for me. I was very aware that I would likely need to stop short, and if that time came, I wouldn’t be able to. I would likely swerve and roll down 30+ feet of hill, my bike coming with me. I wasn’t sure I’d survive something like that, or at the very least, my bike trip wouldn’t survive it.

I was shaking I was so terrified as I tried to continue. Finally, frustrated beyond belief, and rather furious at the man who replaced my brakes in Iowa City, I began to walk my bike down this miles long hill. The entire thing had been recently paved. It was smooth, if not slick, so when I tried to stop with what I had, my wheels wanted to spin out. I loathed the fact that I was walking down a hill like this. Miles of downhill would have been bliss! Any time I have a flat tire is draining, but it was ten miles to Council Bluffs and the hills were endless. I couldn’t handle ten miles of walking my bike with all my gear, so, in an act of desperation, I took out my phone to see if I was close enough to a city to get an Uber. By some miracle I was. Someone had just gotten a ride to Glenwood. I took off both my tires wheels while I waited so i could fit my bike into a sedan. My driver was understandably skittish, stopping her car on the side of a windy road. Skittish in the way I was skittish trying to bike it with no brakes. I acted quickly, got my bike in the car with her help, and she was much more relaxed when she got back in the driver’s seat. She drove me to a hotel in Council Bluffs and I dumped my stuff in the room and finally had a moment to breathe.

That moment didn’t last very long. With my bike out of commission I had to take Ubers to get anywhere in town. I realized, now that I was finally stopped long enough to think and notice, that my eyelids were oddly puffy. They had been kind of stiff for a while because I had missed them with sunscreen and gotten burnt, but this was something else. It was the Fourth of July, too late in the day and too far out to go somewhere, not to mention my reluctance to pay for an Uber just to run an errand. I attempted doordash to no avail and went to sleep. In the morning I woke up and could hardly see. It was Monday, the observation day for the Fourth of July, so I called the bike shop, but to no avail. I took an Uber to Walgreens, bought Benadryl, eye drops, and eye scrub in case it was something that had gotten onto my eyelids and caused this, grabbed a coffee at Starbucks and took the Benadryl immediately. Back in Nebraska City I had tried to see if they had any gravel tires I could put on my bike, before I even got that flat. I found nothing, but I thought it was worthwhile to go to the Walmart here and try. I was in luck. I got a tire, two spare inner-tubes and puncture resistant strips. I took an Uber back to the hotel and replaced the inner-tube and tire in my hotel room through a medicated haze. I slept the rest of the day, taking Benadryl the whole while.

Next morning, I woke up first thing and got an Uber to the bike shop just after they opened. I asked him to replace the brakes and the broken rack and stood there for two hours as he worked. He wound up replacing a cable casing. I noted it as I knew it would mean tightening my cables at some point in the near future. At the start he was sure he had the right brakes, but as he started to work on them he realized they weren’t the right kind. He didn’t have what I needed and there’s been a shortage on bike parts for ages because of Covid. He told me he needed to call his suppliers and to give him some time. I went to a coffee shop in a haze of allergy medication and shock. He told me to call him back in an hour or two. If he didn’t have the parts, if he had to order them from a supplier and IF he could get them from a supplier, that would mean me stuck in Omaha until they showed up. That would push me behind by a week. Without brakes soon and ifI had to wait around, say, for a week, that would mean a week of hotels and campgrounds I hadn’t planned on, and it would mean arriving in the Rockies a week later. That meant I’d likely be crossing the mountains in the snow. I called my mom from the coffee shop, and told her, completely defeated, “This might be the end of the road.”

My mother is a problem solver, and even on the other side of the country, when I told her what was happening, she immediately called my bike manufacturer, befriended the customer service agent on the other end of the line and tried to track down a solution for me. She found a Cannondale certified shop in the area, got the specs for my specific brakes and transcribed everything she was told about the specs I could use in a pinch if I couldn’t find the exact fit. It was two o’clock, so I called the bike repair shop as promised. He told me he’d found a used set of brakes, that they’d probably last another 3,000 miles, but it would get me back on the road. I breathed a sigh of relief and went to pick up my bike. I posted on Facebook while in my defeated stupor, asking for strength from friends and a very new friend (I met her at my friends Emily and David’s wedding back in early June), Chelsea, reached out and very sweetly gave me money to buy myself a nice dinner to boost my spirits. It certainly helped. I had been working on blog posts while at the coffee shop, so when I got my bike I went back there to finish up. After much debate over what I was going to eat, I decided that eating steak in Omaha was appropriate and had a delicious and more expensive meal than I ever would have ventured to have without Chelsea’s generosity. By morning my eyelids had gotten back to normal and I was on the road again, yet the blow to my morale continued for days after.