Tire ouchy!!!

Day 15 - I woke up wide awake at 5:00 AM after an incredibly good sleep. I felt much better, so I got up and completed all my journaling and fixed the tire tube. We remained at the motel a long time and did not get on the road until 10:30 AM. It was already in the 80's and we knew we were in for a hot day of travel. Fortunately, the wind had changed and we enjoyed a NE wind all day. We are now following the Mississippi River Trail (MRT) and it does have great wide shoulders, so we feel quite safe even when the road has heavier traffic. Just a short distance before our first rest stop, we had a rear flat and had to change it in the heat on the side of the road. A short distance later, we reached Hughes, AR., where Geri noticed a grocery store after we had already passed its entrance drive, so we cut across a short patch of grass for just 10 yards. This proved to be a big mistake, because after we finished eating a grocery store lunch and returned to the bike, we found that we had 3 flat tires----the trailer tire and both bike tires! We had run over dozens of thorny burrs with long sharp spikes. It took over 2 hours to change all the tires and try to repair all the tubes. Two of the tubes had over 10 punctures between them and trailer tube had three. I decided to dispose of the 2 bike tubes and replace them at the first bike shop we can find. This only gives me one spare bike tube to travel on now, so we really need to find a bike shop badly. It took a long time inspecting all 3 tires to make sure we have removed every thorn spike. It was a tough task because some of the thorns had broken off and were difficult to see. We were sure glad this didn't happen in front of the post office we had trouble at yesterday. Everyone in Hughes was so friendly and one lady even invited us to her home for dinner and to spend the night. We wanted to make more distance, however, so a little before 5:00 PM we were travelling south on Hwy 79 again. I knew we would probably have more tire problems because finding all those thorns in the tires was practically impossible, so I wasn't surprised when the rear tire started losing air after about 10 miles down the road. Since it was just a slow leak I was able to pump the tire back up on the bike and that was enough to make it to a motel in Marianna, AR. This is not where we planned to stop, but it was close to 7:00 PM and we needed to stop so we weren't pedaling in the dark. It got in the 90's again today, but the helpful wind allowed us to have a much easier day. Even with all our tire problems, we still managed to break 50 miles today and had our fastest average traveling speed of the entire trip of 13.5 mi/hr. Our maximum speed, however, was still only 19 mi/hr, since we continue to pedal on completely flat roads, except when we crossed the St. Francis River where the bridge had a small rise in elevation. We were able to coast a full 50 yards on the other side! We have been flirting with this river ever since Sam A. Baker State Park. We have crossed it many times on this trip. We walked to a nearby KFC/Taco Bell for dinner (guess who had KFC and who had Taco Bell!!). We didn't get to bed real early, because I still had to fix the fifth flat tire of the day!