I was going to go be riding around Denmark with my nephew this year, but COVID-19 thoroughly derailed those plans. All international travel was off the table for spring and summer. As the months of isolation dragged on, I got obsessed with finding some way to still make a bike trip happen, and eventually the government restrictions loosened up enough for me to put this plan together.
This is what I drafted:
The pins represent scraps of civilization.
And in the end, this is what I ended up riding:
The route I ended up riding.
Ever since my ride across the Oregon scrubland in 2009, I’ve wanted to make another bike tour through a hot, dry climate. The isolation, the intensity, and the alien feel of the terrain appeal to me. This summer I need to keep human contact to a minimum anyway, so why not do it outdoors in the blazing sunlight, in an environment hostile to germs?
A flurry of preparation. Don't try this at home folks: You need to be very careful on those hardwood floors!
I packed up the same touring gear that I used for Iceland – an extremely cold climate – but I left out my thick sweater, hiking socks, hiking shoes, and wool hat. Add in a giant thermos and another extra water bottle, pull the extra liner out of my sleeping bag, and I was good to go!
Except for one thing: My cute nightlight needed repairs. Gotta have that!
Temporary workspace while I attempt to repair my highly customized night-light candle.
It's fixed, but its new name is Peg-Leg Pete The Night-Light.
This advice is cobbled together from various internet sources.
Step 1: Remove the wheel and tube
Your best friend here is a pair of plastic tire levers.
Unscrew the little metal ring at the base of the valve and remove it, so you can separate the tube from the tire. Insert one lever between the tire and the rim, just next to where the valve is, and lift that part up and over the edge of the rim so it’s outside it. Usually a tire lever has a little anchor on the opposite side that you can then use to fix the lever in place by hooking that end onto the nearest spoke.
Leave that lever in place, and grab the second lever. Use it the same way you used the first, except instead of hooking it onto a spoke, drag it in a circle around the inside of the tire, levering the whole tire off one side of the rim.
With one side of the tire off, you can then grab the tire and pull the other side over the rim in the same direction, removing the tire entirely with the tube still inside it. Some people who are in a hurry will try to pull the tube out from between the tire and the rim without taking the tire all the way off, but I don’t recommend this. If you take the tire all the way off, you can check the inside for the piece of crud that caused the flat in the first place, and remove it.
Step 2: Find the puncture
Often times a puncture is very hard or even impossible to see. Especially a slow leak. Your best bet is to re-inflate the tube a little bit, then immerse it in water and watch for bubbles to rise. It probably won’t be a dramatic leak when you find it. In fact you may need to squeeze the tube a little bit to drive air through the puncture, in order to find it.
If you’re “in the field” and don’t have a spare tube, and you need to conserve water, you might want to try listening for an obvious “hiss” as you run the tube close to your ear. Another way that works even in loud traffic is to move the tube past your mouth and feel the air from the leak with your lips. It’s strange but it works! Your lips are very sensitive to air pressure and movement.
Once you’ve found the leak, mark it with something obvious. You can use a pen, or you can just place your finger near it and hold on to the tube.
Step 3: Roughen the area around the leak
To work with the tube, you need to get it pulled taut and flat with the puncture centered. You can take your tire levers and snap them together, then wrap the tube around them (it’s what I do) or you can wind the tube around a handlebar or a big stick (also good), or lay it across your knee (I don’t recommend this). The point is to get the area exposed and flat where it won’t slip around.
To roughen, you can use the little square of sandpaper that comes with a puncture kit, or a nail file on your pocket knife, or something similar. The important factor is that whatever you use, it can’t leave any residue like grease or dust.
The area you roughen should be bigger than the patch you’re applying to it, and if this is the first time you’ve done this, you’ll want to roughen it up a bit more than you think.
Step 4: Apply vulcanising solution
This is the tube of stuff that comes with most patch kits. It’s what you’ll want to use for larger punctures. If the leak is slow, and the hole is like a pinpoint, you can use a stick-on patch and skip this step.
Spread the solution over an area that’s larger than the patch, then leave it to cure for at least five minutes. Don’t proceed until this curing is done: This isn’t glue; it’s a surface preparation that only lightly seals the hole but makes the tube a much better bonding surface for the patch.
Step 5: Apply the patch
Patches usually have a foil backing. The backing is usually in two parts, so you can peel off half of it, then put the patch in position, then peel the other half.
Peel the backing off the underside, taking care not to touch the underside itself. Make sure the patch is centred over the hole, then press it into place firmly for 30 seconds or so. Then peel the top side of the backing, being careful to avoid lifting the off patch as you go. Then press down the entire patch for another minute.
Step 6: Inflate the tube (just a bit)
You’ll want to inflate the tube just a little to get it back inside the tire easily. As you do, check that the patch stretches with it. If a gap appears under one edge of the patch, remove it and start again. You’ll need to roughen the tube more thoroughly, and let the vulcanising solution dry for longer.
Once the patch looks solid, you can prevent the tube from sticking to the inside of the tire by running your (probably dirty) hands over it the patch, or even scattering a little road dust on it.
Step 7: Check the tire for the vile beast that did the deed
Before you put the tube back inside the tire, grab the tire and run your fingers carefully around the inside. You will probably find a piece of wire, or glass, or a thorn, or something else that shouldn’t be there. Keep looking until you find something. If you don’t, there’s a good chance you’ll just spring another leak a few more miles down the road.
Sometimes if you can’t find the thing on the inside, you can see it on the outside of the tire, so have a look there next.
Step 8: Get the tire back on the wheel
Once the tube is inside the tire again, without any kinks, and with the valve pointing the right way, it’s time to get the tire back on. At this point you might want to press the valve inward to drain the air entirely out, so the tube is flat along the inside of the tire, as far out of the way as possible.
Many tires have tread on them that works better when the wheel is rolling in a specific direction. Check the side of the tire for an arrow, pointing towards the direction of spin. Chances are your wheel has a disc brake or some cogs on one side, so it fits your bike in just one way. Make sure the direction of the arrow on the tire is the same as the direction the wheel will spin when it’s on the bike.
Use the tire levers to lift one side of the tire over the rim, and then the other, in a reverse of the procedure you used in step 1. Here’s some advice for getting a stubborn tire back over a rim. Once the tire is in place, re-inflate it in two or three stages, rather than taking it all the way up to the maximum in one go. It gives the patch more time to stretch without breaking.
After the first 10 or 15 PSI, I like to pause and then flex the tire back and forth around the rim a bit, to make sure the tube isn’t pinched between the rim and the tire.
Don’t forget to re-apply the metal ring you removed at the beginning!
After all that, put the wheel back on the bike and give it a spin. The tire should not have any obvious bulges or wander around too much along the rim as you spin it.
The best balance of toughness and lightness for shipping a bicycle was the Crateworks box. Sadly the company that makes them has closed its doors and liquidated its inventory.
Mira wants to help load up the bicycles!
The Crateworks Pro XL box was the best box for shipping a recumbent bicycle. I have one, and have used it for six international flights so far, and it shows very little wear and tear. It has kept the hardware perfectly safe even after agents have opened it for inspection at the airport and tossed the contents around.
Some handy numbers for the Crateworks boxes:
Pro XL Box:
Folded dimensions: 53 x 31 x 5 inches (134cm x 79cm x 12cm)
Weight empty: 22lbs (10kg)
Pro XLT Box:
Full size dimensions: 71 x 31 x 11 inches (180cm x 79cm x 12cm) – 113 linear inches total)
Folded dimensions: 53 x 31 x 5 inches (134cm x 79cm x 12cm) (Same as Pro XL Box)
Weight empty: 31lbs (14kg)
Unfortunately I only have the one box. So if I want to go somewhere with another person who also rides a recumbent, things get tricky. I found a solution for my New Zealand trip: Take both bikes completely apart and put the two bare recumbent frames inside one Pro XL box, ziptied securely, and put absolutely everything else in other boxes. The Pro XL just barely passed below the oversize weight limit. But it’s not an easy solution.
Here’s a collection of notes I made as I searched for another airline-suitable box that’s large enough for a recumbent:
126 linear inches total, 50lbs. Up to 70lbs is oversize. Beyond 70lbs is not allowed.
Delta:
115 linear inches total, 50lbs. Up to 70lb is oversize. Beyond 70lbs is not allowed.
Icelandair:
50lbs (22kg) standard weight. Up to 70lbs (32kg) is oversize. If a box is heavier than this, you need to contact Icelandair Cargo to arrange transport for it.
The maximum size of an oversize sporting equipment box: 87in x 22in x 40in, or 221cm x 56cm x 102cm.
Only 25 bicycles are allowed per flight, so it’s recommend that you contact Icelandair in advance to pre-book the box, and ensure space for your bicycle. After booking your ticket you can call the airline directly at 877-435-9423.
Bicycles can be paid for during check-in at the airport, but it costs 20% more than pre-booking.
SAS Airlines:
Does not publish a size limit. Bikes must be in boxes. 50lbs. Up to 70bs is oversize. Beyond 70lbs is not allowed.
Southwest:
Does not publish a size limit. Over 50lbs is oversize.
United Airlines:
115 linear inches absolute maximum, 100lbs maximum, mandatory $200 fee.
Remember those spam emails everyone used to get, with 20 different versions of the same message, slightly different because some of the words have been swapped around? “IMPROVE the SPAN of your TOTEM! Only SOME dollars, what a NICE value!” You may not see many of those emails nowadays, but the technology making them didn’t go away, it just got much better.
It used to be basic substitution: The human would provide the computer with a sentence, and the computer would swap out words for synonyms. The resulting sentence wasn’t meant to fool humans, it was meant to fool other computers to make it through spam filters. It was a war between computers and we got to see the ridiculous consequences of it. And now the technology is so good that it can be used to fool humans directly.
The idea is the same: The computer doesn’t come up with an original opinion, is takes a piece of writing and reconstructs it with fresh words, so it looks like someone else is saying the same thing, and there’s a consensus. You don’t even need a very powerful computer by today’s standards to do this.
Technically, you don’t even need a computer, because this is just a new spin on a very old thing: Propaganda. The Russian government still does propaganda the old fashioned way for example, by hiring its own underemployed citizens to write fake opinions on the internet. Why pay programmers thousands of dollars to write custom software when you can just hire poor people at the equivalent of two bucks an hour to write what you tell them?
Either way – whether the opinions are generated by hired hands or by computer code – advertisers do not need to spend their money trying to change the opinions of real people any more. They can just change the contents of networks and announce victory, relying on people to believe that the network and public opinion are the same. Peer pressure bridges the gap.
It’s way, way cheaper than actually trying to convince you directly. Pay a company like Facebook for metadata to identify your core buyers, or voters, or supporters, or disciples, or whatever, and then crunch it to figure out the best way to get a rise out of them. Pay Facebook again for your content to “randomly” appear to those people, endorsed by some friend-of-a-friend that they’ll never know well enough to question … And watch the needle move in your favor, or watch your enemies go down in flames.
“Gosh, this must be what’s on everyone’s mind! I’ve heard about it from two seemingly unrelated sources, what are the chances of that if it’s not huge? I better investigate…”
Your friends and family wouldn’t deliberately pass you fake information. (Well, unless they like practical jokes.) Generally, you can trust that when they swear something is true, they’ve at least verified it to their own minimum standard, right?
Consider the social media feed of any one of those people. How accurately does it represent what they believe? Huge chunks of their personality are missing. Plus there’s additional stuff, that they didn’t technically endorse, mixed into it. Links to videos and blog posts and other external content, attributed to them, or their friends, or their friends-of-friends. You barely have to scroll a page before you see something supposedly placed there by a person you barely know — or don’t know at all.
Do you rely on feeds like Facebook or Instagram for your news about the world? For your entertainment? Do you read comments beneath videos and blog posts, to get a sense of how a thing is being received? Do you cultivate a Twitter feed, narrowed down to things that interest you, and track the world from there? How about on Snapchat? Reddit? Tumblr? Nextdoor? How about on any website – of any size – claiming to present you with “articles”, curated by “people?”
Everything you see that was not researched and written by someone you know personally, is suspect. You could be looking at a deliberate distortion of facts, in pursuit of a goal, often a political one. No paranoid conspiracy theory is required to justify this idea: It is merely the confluence of money and modern networking hardware. You honestly do not have any way to verify that the person – or thing – that wrote the words you are reading is who or what they claim to be, unless you meet them in a physical space and ask. So you act on faith, almost all the time.
We don’t need to be engulfed in dystopian oligarchy, thank goodness. There are two escape hatches already in place:
The first one is traditional news reporting agencies. Slowly they are leaving the dungeon of paper media and finding decent electronic means to support themselves. Do your best to find an impartial source of news, supplied by real journalists, and subscribe to it. If you’re worried you won’t be able to tell who’s impartial (and good for you, for having that thought) consider my handy dandy list of three metrics you can apply:
Is this thing:
Hilarious
Inflammatory (making you afraid or angry at an enemy)
Clearly wrong (begging for correction)
If it’s big on any of these three things, you’re probably looking at something that was designed to manipulate you, and perpetuate itself by stoking your desire to share it with others. (Easily offended is easily manipulated.) Find a source of information – even if it charges a modest fee – that doesn’t traffic in these three areas, and you’re already ahead of the pack. The service they deliver will be worth a few bucks a week.
You already pay that much to keep parasites off your dog. It’s worth at least that much to keep parasites out of your mind, right?
The second part is, people are learning to be skeptical of any online comment or editorial from anyone they haven’t met face-to-face at least once.
(Something written by a stranger and merely “liked” by someone you know is not enough; in fact it’s almost worthless. The government of Finland recently realized this skepticism was so important they began teaching it in their schools.)
In this new age, a comments board on a website that appears to be full of lively discussion may not necessarily be the product of living beings. It is possible to manufacture something just like it, in the guts of a computer, in less than a second, all the way down to the typos and the jokes, and even grow it dynamically as real people interact with it, and it’s all about as authentic as a hunter’s duck whistle. Knowing people personally is your only sure escape from this madness. So, when you do meet a new person and manage to get a conversation going, ask where they get their news. It’s a fine opportunity for you to gather a source. You’ll learn something however they answer.
And now we arrive at the way this ties into bike touring. (I bet you thought we’d never get there!)
More than any other method of travel, bicycling gives you a way to meet new people – curious and active people – face to face in new places, and gives you the time (and an excuse) to talk to them. It’s faster than a run, but way more accessible than a car. Less confined and more independent than a boat or a train or a plane. Even with just a short trip and a little bit of moxie you can have a hundred conversations, and learn about events near and far, from real people. And not just people concentrated in large cities either, but people everywhere.
A journey is always a perfect subject for a new conversation, and when you’re standing next to a bike loaded with gear, it’s obvious what you’re doing. You’re a curious sight, and you’ll invite questions. Even if you don’t, you have important reasons to practice connecting with new people: You need ground truth information. What’s the best place to eat, for a good price? What’s the best way across town? Do you know where I can find a clean public bathroom?
You don’t need to “pull over” and roll down a window. You just put your feet down and you’re there, ready to talk. You could turn to your smartphone for advice, and most of the time you probably will, but there will come a time sooner than you think when it will drift too far from ground truth.
Seirei no Moribito, translated
When you finish your questions, you pedal the bike for another half-hour, and there you are with a fresh crowd. More practice.
A world-touring cyclist wrote on his blog that one of the key things he learned on his epic journey was to ask people for whatever he wanted, no matter how outlandish the request felt. He’d just been wrong so many times about how generous people could be that he stopped trying to be skeptical. Instead he learned that people would often provide food, shelter, hardware, or advice in exchange for a couple of hours telling stories about his time on the road.
That personal connection, and that first-hand view of the wider world, is a universal human currency. The more you exchange it the more authentic your life becomes — and the weaker the computer-manipulated phantoms of the internet become in turn. They automatically become less real and less relevant as you refresh your humanity. That stress you feel when the online world seems to be in chaos, full of hate and fear — it fades away. Social media is not the truth of the world. It’s something happening in a series of tiny little containers. Good thing you’re not stuck in there, huh?
Ghost In The Shell Arise
Despite what the science fiction of the 90’s promised us, the future of humanity is not spinal cords drifting in tanks full of holograms. That would be the future of something less than humanity, without breath or heat or texture, without the sense of place or limited life, without the danger. Humanity is anchored to this “middle world,” where all truly real phenomena reside.
Outside this middle world, perhaps there is another universe, or heaven, or nothing. Inside the middle world, there is virtual reality, social media, and altered states of mind. No matter how amazing and intricate those other things become, the middle world will always anchor us. It’s not a simulation (despite what you may have heard from some wacky industrialist) and it’s not merely a container for simulations. We all live our one real life within it, until we cease being human completely.
Refresh your humanity, not your browser.
And by the way, it’s not my intention to shame anyone who cannot get out there and ride because of a physical limitation or because they are too buried in work or in caring for others. But insofar as people have a choice, I hope they choose to spend their free time interacting with the outside world and other people directly, rather than punching smartphone buttons and arguing with digital ghosts. The online rabbit hole doesn’t lead anywhere, it just keeps going.
The road outside, though — that leads everywhere good.
