There was noting wrong with Walter the Trionic walker when I put him back in the car after Hylands Park, and I left him in there overnight. But yesterday morning when I opened the car to put some other stuff in before leaving for Oaklands Park, I noticed that one of his back tyres was flat. So I heaved him out of the car to go in the garage, and found the other back tyre was flat as well. Hylands is clearly more dangerous than I knew.
I put Victor the Veloped (off-road walker) in the car instead, and off we went to Oaklands. I parked in one of the disabled slots, Sue went off to get coffees from the cafe, and I started getting Victor out. Only then did I discover that he had a flat back tyre too...
The good side is that I did the walk around the park with just a stick. I've been feeling for a while that it's about time I had a decent walk with a stick rather than a walker, but you can get rather dependent on the extra security and stability of a walker, and it becomes hard to let that go. The problem at Oaklands is more mud than uneven ground, so it was quite a good place for the experiment, and it went well. I must now do more like that and build up the confidence a bit - but remembering that with myeloma-weakened bones a fall and a fracture would not be exactly welcome...
Puncture repairs occupied the afternoon. These small wheels with chunky 12" and 14" tyres aren't that easy to do and really need at least three hands on the tyre levers. I actually had four punctures across three tyres, and removed two small and viciously sharp thorns. Couldn't find a cause for the other two. I threw out the inner tube with two punctures (for some reason the patches refused to stick well) and replaced with a new one, and patched the other two. Now I wait to see if they'll hold air overnight. And I suppose I'd better order up some more spare tubes from Trionic, and another puncture repair kit from Amazon...
Going to Maldon today, and taking Rolly the original Rollator, who's good enough on paved ground and has solid tyres making him puncture-proof! The tyres I repaired yesterday are still holding air OK but I haven't checked the pressures yet and won't entirely trust them until I've had a couple of short local walks first.
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