Bits and bobs

To begin this post, I'll start with a bit of background information: Most multitools for bikes come with tools for breaking and rejoining chains. As our tandem has belts I searched long and hard for a tool that had everything we needed on it but didn't have a chain breaker. The only downside is that it doesn't have a tool that fits spokes. A few days ago, out of the blue, I realised that we have been carrying spare spokes in case of breakage but we have no means of tightening them. I felt a right idiot; 10 thousand km with spare spokes that would have been useless without a tool to tighten them. Thus one of the things I was keen to do was to visit some bike shops in San Salvador to buy a spoke key.

We had visited one on our way in whilst tired and not thinking straight. They had sold me a cheap spoke key designed to fit every size. When I checked it out I realised that it was poorly made and not a good fit. I tried several other shops and they only had the same sort. On the final day of our stay I decided that I would walk back to the first shop and see if they had any others.

At first they tried to reassure me that it was fine. I persisted and they began to look in various bags and boxes under the counter. It was then that I spied a 'Park Tools' logo. Park make excellent tools and they do a range of spoke keys in different colours corresponding to different sizes. I needed the black one. In the bag was only a green one and a red one. I asked if they had a black one and the assistant disappeared upstairs. He was gone for ages. I began to expect that he would reappear with information about how soon they would be able to order one in for me. 

Eventually he came back downstairs with a dusty, old package containing - a black Park Tools spoke key. It is a perfect fit. Now if we have a spoke breakage, I'll not find myself beside the road with spare spokes but no means of tightening them.

We had a great visit to the centre of San Salvador. Sadly, there are no photos to record it. We use a tiny, waterproof digital camera for our photos as it takes better pictures than our phones and is quicker to operate. We pop the SD card, put it into a card reader and plug that into my phone to transfer our pictures to Google. It has been a brilliant system so far. But after our day in the centre, something happened to the card and neither my phone nor the camera would recognise it. Grrr. We had taken some great photos of the library and the Iglesia del Rosario  (click on the architecture link) but also some interesting ones like a photo of the start ramp from the recent Tour of El Salvador in the main square. We have kept the memory card and hope that we might be able to recover the pictures when we get home.

Incidentally, we lost another day's photos as well. We got a new memory card and stuck it straight into the camera and snapped away. It was only at the end of the day that we realised that we should have put it in the phone first so it could format it appropriately. Ho hum - every day is a learning day.

I'll do another post shortly with an update on our journey but before that I'll mention another purchase we made recently. We use our water filter regularly, whether to filter stream water or, more often, to filter tap water in countries where it is not safe to drink.

For six months we have had to keep a watchful eye when filtering to ensure that the water coming out of the filter ended up in our bottles. However, the other day I popped into hardware store and asked, on the offchance, if they had any tubing. They had just the thing and we now have a short length attached to the end of the filter making the process much easier.