More Miraculous Air Travel

Like most of my previous bike tours, this one involves a huge pile of stuff. There’s the bicycle in a humungous box, but also two additional suitcases full of camping gear, parts, clothing, electronics, and so forth.

I worry about thieves grabbing my suitcases off the luggage carousels, so the more decorated and weird and eye-catching they are, the better. Luckily I had a fine artist on hand!

Jon arrived right on schedule and gave me a ride to the airport in his groovy truck, and helped me unload the gear when we got there. We had fun telling war stories about old software upgrades gone wrong, and the changing nature of our industry.

Thanks to this handy SFO Security Time Estimate web page, I could relax about the time it would take to pass through all the checkpoints when I got to the airport.

I stuck the little wheels on the bottom of the box, hooked one suitcase onto the handle of the other, and rolled everything to the check-in desk.

Well that was close! I had to pay the over-weight fee, but I didn’t have to pry open the box and shuffle things around like last time.

As I roamed around and located my gate, then settled in to do some paperwork, I checked the state of my luggage on my phone. The two suitcases and the bicycle slowly migrated across the airport, and by the time I was on the plane, the Airtags told me my luggage probably was too. Airtags are just wonderful for this sort of thing.

Here’s another reason I’m a lucky bastard: I can spend enough money to get a nonstop flight. Why does this matter to me? The dang luggage. A bicycle box is awkward, and relatively fragile. If it has to be moved between airplanes it will be messed with by airport personnel at least twice as much. And it’s quite possible one of them will damage the box or the contents while they’re mucking around inside looking for nuclear weapons or five thousand tiny snakes or whatever.

So, to ease my paranoia, I’m going non-stop. I could have potentially started the trip much closer to Norway – or in Norway – and tacked Amsterdam onto the end, but everything non-stop over there was brutally expensive. Plus, seeing Zach in Amsterdam was important. I didn’t want to defer that and potentially miss it.

And so, we flew nearly over the top of the world, in a straight line to Amsterdam:

As we passed over Greenland I looked down and saw an endless expanse of fog-shrouded snow, piled on top of itself and blown into long, curving valleys by the freezing wind. I thought of the jacket in my backpack, and the wee life vest that was supposedly somewhere beneath my chair.

Even if there was an actual airstrip down there, and the plane landed and rolled to a stop without any problems, we would all freeze solid long before any rescue could arrive. We wouldn’t even have time to resort to cannibalism.

On that note, time for dinner!

As we passed over Iceland I looked down and recognized one of the finger-like appendages of the northwestern region.

I’d bypassed this on my first trip in 1999. That had been late summer, after the tourist rush, and I navigated a fair amount of wind and rain, but there hadn’t been a scrap of snow on those mountains. In the winter they’re a whole lot less inviting.

You ever try pedaling a loaded bicycle on a snow-covered road? If so, good job: You did the best that anyone can do, which is try.

I drifted in and out of consciousness a bunch, wearing noise-canceling headphones and an eye mask and using my inflatable pillow and the patch of blanket they give you for the flight. About all I could handle for input was episodes of The Goon Show, and when that was too complicated I just went with ambient music by Alio Die.

At long last we flew over land that wasn’t covered in snow, and as we spun around the airport I could see fields of flowers in long rectangles all around us.

Something tells me this is the Netherlands!