Lift-off Minus 4 : Wishing I was lucky
A long bike ride requires a lot of planning. Cycling seems so carefree and simple but the preparation for a long ride isn’t. The last four months have consisted entirely of planning the route, the accommodation, the bike, the luggage, communications, trying to get fit and getting advice on avoiding a sore bum.
Of all these the subject that has moved beyond being a mere obsession into something bordering on a major personality disorder has been the simple question “What should I take”. Travelling without a back–up vehicle means becoming a tortoise which certainly fixes the mind on how to keep the weight down. I’m normally the “5 minute” packer who frequently pays the price by buying yet another toothbrush but this time I seem to enter a parallel universe where the less you pack the longer it takes.
Being English I took it for granted that I’d be a fashion-free cycling zone but I hadn’t reckoned on the difficulty of reconciling weight with practicality. Everyone I spoke to had a different idea of the bare necessities of life and muttered strange incantations about “multi-functional devices” which are, apparently the expensive, Zen solution to light-weight packing. Believe me, there are people, and web-sites out there who will urge you to shave off a few more grammes by using titanium cutlery.
For route finding some would rely upon a sat nav. But would it be reliable in Latvia? and what if the batteries failed? Being a man of a certain age I preferred to put my faith in paper and painstakingly traced my route using several detailed maps purchased from London. I cut-out this route and discarded the rest of the maps, there-by taking weight-watching to new highs (or lows). But in a casual conversation in one of the many cycles shops that now feel like home, a “been there, done that” remarked that he’d done the same only to find that the roads on the map bore no relation to those on the ground. And so on a particularly cold night in Spain (cold in Spain?….that triggered a quick panic attack) he had burned the lot on the camp fire and completed his ride using nothing more than his trusty compass. So my Silva compass was added to the over-filled “things to take” box which was cascading out of the spare bedroom onto the landing.
When it finally came to pack I was reluctant to bury the compass in either my front or rear panniers reckoning that the chance of finding it when I most needed it would always be less than one in four. I wanted it right in front of me. But bicycle handlebars aren’t like car dashboards, they don’t have secret compartments which open up to huge refrigerated cupboards jokingly called glove boxes. Nor I thought ruefully, do they come equipped with built in air-bags.
So since then I’ve been puzzling over where, precisely to put my compass (so to speak). The answer came soon after I bumped into David Pike from the Guildhall when doing the Sunday shopping yesterday in Asda. There lying modestly amongst the children’s toys and cycle accessories was a truly mulit-functional device...... a bicycle bell (which I also needed) with a built-in compass all for £2.99. I thought that would be the final addition to my ultra-sophisticated black touring bike, complemented by 100% waterproof, fluorescent yellow panniers (and christened by my daughter as the wasp) but I was wrong.
This morning, in the post courtesy of my mother arrived Lucky. I can’t describe Lucky; you’ll have to have a look for yourself on the accompanying picture. For now as s/he doesn’t have to pedal and s/he seems content to ride on the back bumper in the style made popular by refuse trucks. Hopefully the next time I blog Lucky will have seen a few miles of tarmac roll by.
Thanks to everyone who has helped I raising money for the Chairman Charities – more about this after I set off on Friday.
Duncan