The word of the weekend has been ‘packing’. On Saturday morning I transported the final items from my move from the south to my new ‘lock-up’ in Halifax (it’s actually a large wooden box in a former woollen mill) and then, after having packed most of my cycling gear in a large holdall on Friday, I spent several hours today preparing Reggie the bike for his journey to Spain. As always, removing the pedals was as frustrating as it was long but eventually through a combination of brute force and, well, more brute force, they came loose and my bicycle is now the filling in a very large cardboard and bubble wrap panini. The holdall and panini/bike are due to be collected by Luggage Mule tomorrow at some point leaving me with the relatively simply task of packing the things I need for my own trip to Malaga on Wednesday and from there to Estepona and Cadiz… I hate packing!
Categories: Cycling
A few years ago I found myself at Istanbul airport with a bike whose pedals did not want to come off. I got the one off with a bit of effort but the other one just would not budge. People were coming up to me and telling me, in Turkish, that I was turning the pedal the wrong way, even though i knew I was right, and soon I started to doubt my sanity. Time was running out and in desperation I turned to the crowd of people also waiting for the flight to Heathrow and asked if anyone knew anything about bikes. “I do – I work in a specialist bike shop” came the reply. The chap took one look and put his foot down on the spanner really hard and the pedal budged. My brute force had just not been brutal enough. I checked in with 5 minutes to spare.