Before We Leave
How to prepare for a bike trip.
June 30, 2008
In order to get a better deal on our flights, we had to buy tickets through separate airlines, which makes our trip less convenient. We're leaving from Oakland instead of doing the sensible thing and leaving from the nearby San Jose airport. We're also leaving at 6:30 in the morning. With two large bike boxes and two stuffed duffle bags, taking public transport would have been a real chore. Luckily my loving sister volunteered to do the chauffeuring. To make her job a bit more tolerable, we decided to leave the night before and camp at the airport until dawn. Asking your sister to wake up at 3 in the morning to drive to the airport is a great way to lose your sister.
In the mean time we've been doing all of the little things it takes to leave on a bike trip. I had the privilege today to fit our bikes into their boxes, which is always a memorable experience. Imagine you're doing a decent job in Tetris; you're filling up most of the holes with your blocks and thinking you'll probably be breaking your personal best score, but then the game sends you a series of the same damn blocks you didn't want to see and you start creating an ugly block pile on one side of the screen. Then you over rotate a block at the last second and all hell breaks loose. Before you know what's happening the blocks stack up the middle and the intense Russian jitterbug is only a terrible memory, like a night spent drinking cheap beer at a bowling alley.
After the 10-round bout with the bike boxes, I needed some relaxation. I needed to play a board game. For our trip, we decided it would be fun to bring along some games in case we were stuck in our tent waiting out an Icelandic summer snow storm. I used a black marker to draw a backgammon board on my bright orange ground pad, but we didn't have any good men to move around the board. Carrie came through though when she returned home from the dollar store today with a portable foam checker board that looked like it should have been sold at a penny store instead. But the checker board came complete with little foam circles that could double as backgammon men. Now, along with our ipod stocked with This American Life and Radio Lab podcasts, we have something to do during the no-flashlights-required nights near the arctic circle.
The remaining time we spend before we leave will involve going over checklists and tying any loose ends. It's all very exciting, and in about 5 and a half weeks you'll get to read a lot more about it. So until then, here's a little something you can do while awaiting our return.
