Navigation
Where am I?:^mistymornings-->Cycletouring-->2009-->Summer.-->Day 6

Day 6-3. Meldorf to Tönning contd.

At two, Herr Kraus arrived and opened up shop. After dealing with another customer he came over to have a look at Damae's rim. He quickly realised that we needed a wheel build and said he could replace the rear cog too. When we asked about how long it would take, he said that it should be ready the next day. We were amazed by this: a wheel build within twenty-four hours, that would never be possible in our bit of Holland (unless you did it yourself). This cheered us up immensely, although decided not to assume that all would go according to plan. We didn't want to invoke our First Law of Cycletouring again. No, not we didn't want to do that, especially just after we'd found a cycle repair man on a mission.

We left Damae's bike in the capable hands of Herr Kraus, piled most of Damae's panniers on my bike and made our way to the campsite closest to the centre of town. By half past three we'd set up our temporary home between two large motorhomes. There was a view over the Eider and even better the campsite had a kitchen and a washer and dryer. We decided to make the most of the enforced stop and get all our clothes washed an ready for whenever Damae's bike was back on the road. We'd also realised that we'd forgotten a small groundsheet that we used for sitting outside in the evenings. That would be another thing on our to do list for tomorrow.

A little later we wandered out to have a quick look round town. It turned out that Tönning was a lovely town, with a marina and a large square in the centre. We would have time to kill tomorrow so just had a quick look round We found a supermarket on the East side of town half way between Herr Kraus' two wheel emporium and the campsite. We had little luck finding an outdoor shop although we spotted a DIY shop that certainly would sell builder's tarps.

We got back an hour or so later, and set to with making a late dinner. As the weather was fine, we decided to sit outside and make use of some of our driftwood. We spent some time sawing the dry bleached wood into three centimetre long section and then set to preparing tea. Cooking with a Bush Buddy is more labour intensive than cooking with a Trangia. But, it didn't matter today as we had nowhere to go until the Troll-Too was fixed.

We were both a little despondent. One of our low maintenance bikes had suffered a failure and Damae was even more sad that it was her lovely VSFT400 that had died. I was trying to work out why the rim had failed and wondered if it had something to do with the SmartSAM tyres (balloon tyres apply more pressure to the rim walls) or maybe the pressure gauge on our new bike pump was wildly inaccurate (which could mean we were over inflating our tyres).

We were not going to find the answer tonight, so went to bed early. A couple of light showers came and went and the temperature dropped to a more comfortable level. Tönning quietened slowly as the sun set and we fell asleep, hoping that tomorrow would bring good news.

Previous page Next page