Bike Wrenching Day 1 – Tubeless Tires

6/28/2021 – Today was interesting. I got a text today while I was at work from Iceland Air that our flight was changed from August 2 to August 1, so I went online to make sure everything was still in order with our flights. I ended up finding out that we now only had a flight to Iceland on August 1 and our flight to Glasgow was cancelled…

I immediately told my grandpa, who I was working with, that I needed to go make a phone call and then I would come back to work. So after a half hour phone call with a woman with an Icelandic accent and a horrible mic I was able to rearrange our flights and get us to Glasgow.

The woman who I was speaking to gave me such a hard time on the phone. She told me that my only option was for us to get to Glasgow on August 11 but I knew that was just too late because A. We would just be waiting to leave at that point and B. We wouldn’t be able to make it to the music festival we have tickets for in southern England from August 27-29. So after I made her check options for all surrounding airports and all dates I realized that was my only option. So she told me “Just to confirm, you will leave MSP on august 1 and stay in Iceland until august 10.” Yet another moment where I knew that was impossible, Iceland is such an expensive country and we would need to blow probably $1000+ on hotels alone.

I made her look again and lo and behold there was a flight for August 4 from MSP and touchdown in Glasgow on August 5. Which I think should’ve been the first option she gave me but I guess she was just confused, or maybe trying to get us to single handed lay boost her countries economy, who knows.

Henry was texting me throughout the whole phone call I had with her saying things like “Get us first class tickets for the “inconvenience”!🥵🥱” Sadly, I was unable to secure us any sort of upgrade, the super cozy and roomy seats sounded so nice for a while..

When I got home Henry came over and my dad taught us how to switch over to tubeless tires so now Henry and I are both on tubeless tires so we won’t have to do tons of flat tire changes throughout the trip. Henry also got some SWEET orange water bottle cages for his bike. I also set up my new bike computer that was gifted to me by a fellow biker and friend named Aaron, who’s wife Mary is currently riding the great divide race!

After we switched over to tubeless tires our friend Todd Johnson came over to talk with us about working with his class throughout our trip and we came up with a good plan to work with his geography classes at Lakeville Middle School. His classes will be following along with our blog and sending questions to us throughout the trip so they can follow along and learn from what we are doing.

We will also be working with Henry’s 5th grade teacher Jeff Sambs who approached me at a grad party asking to follow along with us for his class. His class will be doing the same as Todd’s class but also adding our route to a part of their weekly homework packet for learning about geography.

Here are some photos from the tubeless process! Some of the photos have refused to upload but hopefully I can get them up eventually.