August 12; 112km, 712m vertical

St Stephen to St John, NB, cool and wet
Some days are bad (like last Wednesday) and then other days start off as bad and just get worse. Today was such a day. It started spitting with rain as we set off and then turned to heavy rain a short time later and this time it was 5C cooler than last week. We were on a busy road so we got a good shower from the rear as trucks passed while we were pelted unmercifully from the front by rain pushed by a NE wind or our own speed down the hills. At 50km we were pleased to see a restaurant so we had a break for lunch and had to leave a good tip to compensate for the pools of water dripping off the table and chairs creating an ever widening puddle on the floor. The weather appeared to be clearing up as we left the restaurant but it soon started raining heavily again. At 65km we hit a 15km stretch of roadworks which made for rough riding on the hard shoulder and the grooves in the ground off road surface were waterlogged ensuring more intensive clouds of water from passing traffic. After the roadworks the hard shoulder was still in a poor state covered with large amounts of grit and loose gravel and I was getting concerned about the risk of puncturing which is always much higher in the wet. And guess what? At 87km there was a bang and a hiss and within a second TimB had a flat front tyre. Upon inspection we found a half inch long slash in the flank of the tyre and tube. In the pouring rain and colossal showers from passing traffic it proved impossible to get the self adhesive tyre patches to stick so we had to unpack the emergency race tyre. Using large handfuls of TimB’s emergency toilet roll we were able to get the tube dry enough to patch it and after about 40min we had his bike back together and ready to roll. That was when I picked my bike up to repack the tools etc and found my back tyre was flat. Out with the tools again (and the toilet roll) and another tube patched. Definitely not our best day. A man in a pickup truck did stop and offer to take us to town but we turned the offer down because it would have meant riding the 25km back west in the morning to turn round and carry on and we don’t have time for an extra 50km tomorrow.