June 12th

The O'conners gave us a gift certificate to subway also!  So we used it to get breakfast before heading out of town.  While we were ordering, a super cool guy from Canada started asking about our trip. He was down in the area working at a local mine. He bought us a dozen cookies! Man people are so cool! We took off with high hopes and full stomachs. About 5 miles out of town our first flat occurred. After taking the spare water bottles, saddle bags, trailer and tire off, we patched over the patch. The tire held pressure so we put everything back on, and set off. This time we made it a good 20 miles. After repeating the process I just mentioned, we set off hoping the triple patch would hold. Well for 10 miles it did, then back to patching over patches yada yada yada. This happened 6 times! We had made it 40 miles when we should have made it 80 and wasted almost the whole day! The nearest town with spare tubes was 30 miles and by this time we would make it about 5 before it would go flat. We decided  to use the next best thing, our thumbs. After many failed attempts, two trucks pulled over. They were the most red neck boys you could ever meet. Three of them, oil field workers who liked driving trucks and loved driving them fast!  We arrived in Hill City, South Dakota in record time and still alive! They were super nice for picking us up and we did have some good conversations about "workin 65 days strait from sun up to sun down", you know usual stuff. We decided since it was dark out, to use our one mulligan and stay in an Inn. Oh the beds were so soft and we watched this thing called TV! So after a long  day of dealing flat tires we washed off the grease and slept like a kings/queens!