Several miles from today’s destination – Bay City, Mich. – I ran over something and heard a loud bang followed by a furious hissing sound. Thinking it was probably nothing, I kept up my torrid pace.

Just kidding! I pulled into a driveway and watched my rear tire deflate faster than my dreams. Off everything came (from the bike), upside down went the bike and a quick release later, I was futilely trying to inflate the inner tube to see where the problem was.

Turns out, the tire gave a pretty good indication of what had happened. I’m afraid the pictures were all a bit rushed as I was more concerned with making repairs, but here you can see how big the unwelcome intruder was:

Here’s another (blurry) view in situ:

So you can see from the fact that the pointy bit is sticking out through the tire that the nail head actually went in first and punched a nice round hole in the tire. Here is a later, better picture if that:

So I must have ridden over something that the nail was in but with the head protruding a bit so when I hit it, it went clear through the tire and got pulled out of whatever it was nailed into.

Fortunately, the wise old bike shop guy way back in Kellogg, Idaho, suggested I buy something called a tire boot – it’s basically a tough adhesive patch that goes on inside your tire to give it some emergency protection until you can get a new tire.

I’ve put almost 10 miles on it so far and intend to ride 55 miles to Flint before I can get to a bike shop that hopefully has my correct tire size in stock.

Nothing against the guy at the bike shop in Spearfish who sold me my “bombproof” Kevlar tire, but right now it’s Kellogg 1 and Spearfish 0.