We’ve worked hard over the last couple months to get physically ready for this trip. We generally got 1-2 hours of riding in before I left for work and rode 4-6 hours on Saturdays. This last Saturday we had our final long ride and it was windy: 25 mph steady with gusts of far more. We had completed about 40 miles of our ride and had stopped to rehydrate and eat a snack. I parked the bike so the back was facing the wind. Natalie suggested that it might blow over. I helped remind her that I have an advanced degree in physics and there was no risk of wind from the back of the bike tipping it over. Moments later, as we started to eat, Natalie looked knowingly in my direction, both of us having heard the loud crash of the bike hitting the ground hard. To her credit, she didn’t rub it in.
We picked it up, no worse for the wear. We ride a crazy heavy steel bike so it can deal with my “physics.” It has an extra heavy kickstand because when it’s fully loaded with panniers, it has to hold up a lot of weight. The kickstand was bent, as the bike had been slammed on its side. Not a gentle grandma push, but more of a hulk hogan body slam. Grateful for its durability we finished our ride.
On Monday I started the long process of taking it apart so it can fit in two bike boxes. As I removed the kickstand from its mount I realized the tip over was more damaging than I originally assessed. The kickstand had worked as a lever to peel back the steel tubing at the mount’s weld, resulting in a crack in a critical load-bearing component.
My first thought was to ignore it and deal with it later. But realizing I have far more resources at home, I started thinking of who I knew who could weld. My kind neighbor Wyatt came to mind, so I called him. Unfortunately he was away and wouldn’t be home for a while. Then I thought of Eli, a friend at work who had talked about his plans to build his own bike, so I called him. He understood the challenges of welding thin tubing and was willing to drop everything to help me out. I drove up to his house, he welded the frame, and I was back home before 10 PM.
So many things happened with this experience. I don’t feel unlucky or lucky, I just feel grateful. I’m grateful for people like Eli and Wyatt. I’m grateful that the bike was damaged without involving us being hurt. I am grateful our trip is still on.
It caused me to think of something Elder Gong shared in General Conference. He spoke of a Chinese proverb where his neighbors attributed the twists and turns in his life to either being lucky or unlucky, and at each step he replied “we’ll see.” This idea helps me appreciate how the individual threads of experiences that weave together to create the tapestry of our lives are neither bad nor good in and of themselves, but rather the value is in the final product. This ride, including our preparation, will have ups and downs, but no single experience will define the trip. We haven’t yet arrived in Geneva, but I predict our ride will be defined by the time we get to spend together appreciating the wonder of different geographies of cultures. There will be hard moments and there will be blissful moments, but after the ride is over they will all combine into our memory of our late summer ride from Geneva.