Tuesday, January 20, 2009

New Wheels

No ,we haven't bought a new car but while we were in NZ we did pick up some new wheels for Angela's bike. 

After asking around at some of the bike shops in Auckland we learnt that at the time we bought Angela's bike Avanti had a batch of wheels that had been built with dud spokes from China. This is why they were breaking. The Avanti shop offered to replace all the old spokes for free, but of course the old wheels are in Samoa. Unfortunately the rear wheel was quite badly buckled and not worth saving, so we managed to pick up a new set of wheels a discounted price thanks to Avanti.

The day we got home Angela had me at work on the bike, transferring the brakes, gears etc from her old wheels to the new ones so that we could get out for a ride. This time I knew I had all the tools and knew what to do after having done it once or twice already. So the new wheels were ready to go and the next day we took them out for a test.

It was Sunday and we decided to ride around the coast to Malua, where the turtle pool is, so that we could look at the turtles and maybe have a swim in the sea.  I thought it would be about 8 km, but it was actually about 13.5km. Still, it was a nice ride and the bike went well. We discovered that riding on Sunday is great because there are very few cars on the road andas we were riding along the main highway (Samoa's equivalent of State Highway 1) there were no dogs.  

So we watched the turtles for a while and then discovered a fresh water swimming hole across the road.  We had a nice refreshing dip before riding home.  The ride was a bit further than expected, but the bike is good so now we can start training to ride around Savaii.  

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