NZ Day 1: Flying In

February 22, 2015 by Filed under Advice, Happy, Stress Tagged with

The theme for today was Oversize Baggage!

Look at the size of those containers. That’s two recumbent bicycles and all associated gear – a little over 200 pounds total. The airline hauled all that, plus the two of us with our backpacks, over 6500 miles across the Pacific Ocean in less than a day. The modern world is amazing.

Still, there were a few snags. The shuttle that arrived to take us to the airport could not fit the longest box, because a plastic divider was installed in the back, separating the seats from the luggage area. We’d called ahead multiple times and given the dispatcher the exact measurements, but the dispatcher apparently ignored all that and sent the standard van anyway. There wasn’t enough time to call another van, so I ran inside my house and fetched an electric screwdriver, and removed the plastic divider myself, handing the loose parts to the driver as I went. The driver didn’t mind; he was just happy that we had a solution to the problem. Extra points to him! Zero points to the dispatcher. Boo! Hiss!

Once we actually got the boxes to the Air New Zealand check-in counter, the attendants there could not believe we were allowed to bring such huge items as luggage. It wasn’t that they had any specific policy in mind that disallowed it, it’s just that the sight of those boxes made them want to say no. In fact, they assumed it was against the rules, until I called up NZ Air’s own baggage policy website on my phone and showed it to them, and read the relevant parts out loud.

The policy is this: A recumbent bike is an oversize sporting item. If it’s disassembled and packed into a container within 1.8 meters on the longest side and under 70 pounds, it is permissible. A bike divided into multiple boxes to fit within the per-container size and weight restrictions is still counted as a single item of luggage.

So, according to their rules, this is two items of luggage, each one oversize and overweight. We had no other checked items, so all we needed to pay was the oversize and overweight fee for each bicycle.

If you’re patient enough and make your case with confidence, and don’t mind waiting around for the inevitable discussion with the managers, and perhaps the managers’ managers, you’ll make it through at that price. If you’re paranoid, you can do what I did, and overpay the luggage fees in advance, but be warned: Even though the website says the ‘oversize’ and ‘overweight’ fees are interchangeable with the ‘extra bag’ fee, the person at the counter might claim otherwise, and ask you to pay them all over again, minutes before your flight, without letting you apply the extra value of one to the other. Then, your flight will leave too soon for you to get a refund for the ‘extra bag’ units you purchased, screwing you out of many hundreds of dollars.

I say, if it looks like that’s about to happen, pitch a genuine fit. That’s just plain wrong!!

Anyhoo, we got our gear checked, and spent the next 15 hours in a series of highly uncomfortable chairs, barely getting any sleep. You know the drill. Long-haul international flights!

Here’s the view passing over Auckland. Pretend the window glare is a hallucination due to lack of sleep!

This is us in SFO, then us in Auckland a zillion hours later. As uncouth Americans, we made sure that our first meal in New Zealand was a terrible one. We’re both utter zombies at this point. I’m running on about half an hour of sleep.

To catch our connecting flight we had to walk about half a mile outdoors between terminals. Not a fun thing to do while hugely sleep-deprived. I was muttering the whole time: “Honestly, New Zealand, what brought about this failure of urban planning? Is this some sort of hazing ritual for foreigners? HUrrrr. BRAAAAAAIIIIIINS.”

Anyway, we caught our connection – a charming little prop plane that flew nice and low, giving us an enticing view of the terrain we would soon explore – and then we had one more oversize luggage wrestling match, this time with the shuttle from the airport to our hotel. The only strategy that worked was to commandeer an empty shuttle and stuff the box down the passenger aisle, blocking the whole thing, then shove the smaller boxes into the luggage area, filling it up.

Luckily it was a slow day, and we only had two other people riding the shuttle. They were very gallant about the situation – even hopping out help us unload! We left a nice tip.

We checked in and I pulled the ripcord on my luggage. KABOOM! The view out the windows was lush and inviting. It rained three separate times while we cleaned up and organized ourselves; a warm tropical rain with sunbeams visible on the bay.

We napped for about half an hour, then spent almost all of the rest of the day doing this, in a sleepy haze. The time-lapse video stops after the first 75 minutes or so because the phone battery died, but we kept going for another five hours.

We made it! ADVENTURE TIME.

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Leading Up To Another Trip

February 6, 2015 by Filed under Curious, Happy, Stress

Back in 2000 I became briefly fascinated with the idea of moving to New Zealand and getting an IT job, and exploring the country for a while. I’d been feeling frustrated with my social life and untethered from everyone around me, and was ready for a fresh start.

In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t go through with it. It wouldn’t have been a healthy move. But hindsight is 20/20.

Oh dang; stop the bike! Is that a SALE???

I abandoned the idea, but New Zealand still held its appeal as a beautiful place to explore.

Years later when I got into bicycle touring, the country was an obvious choice for a long trip, but it was also an ambitious one – too ambitious for me. I didn’t have the money, or the time, and most importantly, I didn’t have the experience under my belt to know how to schedule and prepare for such a huge adventure.

Then much later in 2010, in a desperate attempt to relieve the pressure of work and get some perspective on my life, I threw together a trip to Australia and Tasmania. That involved transporting the bike as luggage, acquiring a passport, getting immunizations, exchanging currency, booking things from half a world away, learning new traffic laws, making field repairs, and so on.

The trip was a success, and my confidence got a boost.

I also realized how much fun there was to be had, combining bicycling with computers, gadgets, and photography! It was a convergence of hobbies, and the trip left me wanting more.

In 2011 I went on another long trip, crossing a big chunk of the US. Again, my life was in upheaval, and I was looking for answers. It wasn’t one of those grand things where the rider dips one wheel into the Pacific, then rolls it into the Atlantic months later, but it was a good solid chunk of exercise, meditation, photography, and some soul-searching as well.

It was also very seat-of-the-pants. From one day to the next I didn’t know how far I would get, where I would be spending the night, where I would eat, or what I would see on the way.

Ultimately, that experience was a confidence boost as well. I told myself that the next time I did a bike trip, it would be something really ambitious.

Life had other plans of course. I got very busy with a new job and a series of romantic misadventures, then I bought a duplex – easily the biggest project I’ve ever undertaken.

Then I met Kerry. Kerry likes adventure. I believe it was our third date, when we met in a huge parking lot in San Francisco, me on my bicycle, her on her skateboard, and we attached a long bungee cable to the back of my bike and towed her around like she was skiing on a lake, hitting 25mph turns and whipping around me, until the police showed up and ordered us to stop.

We saw The Desolation Of Smaug twice in the theatre, and suddenly, a bicycle tour of New Zealand was right there in the front of my mind again.

And now, a year later, we’re doing it. On matching recumbents, but with cameras from rival companies. It’s gonna be a Canon vs. Sony shootout, spread over 30 days, with bicycling, swimming, surfing, snorkeling, kayaking, canoeing, hiking… And OF COURSE, a tour of Hobbiton.

It’s costing us both a painful amount of money, but we both think it’s worth it. We’ve been preparing for months, and we fly out in two more weeks. I’ve been putting in an absurd amount of work hours to earn extra vacation time, and I’m simultaneously excited, anxious, and exhausted.

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The lengths a person will go to, to avoid driving in San Francisco…

September 5, 2014 by Filed under Amused, Stress

The stickers make it look cooler than it is. It’s actually an aluminum table that folds up nicely for camping.

Found it on Craigslist. It would have taken me just as long to find rush-hour parking for my van, I swear!

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Plastic

September 5, 2014 by Filed under Stress

My city has a separate recycling mechanism for plastic bags, relative to the standard throw-it-in-the-can method we used for everything that has a little symbol on it.

There are free dropoff points for plastic bags around the city, and if you feel like a good samaritan, you can haul your bags out there and stuff them in.

This is approximately eight months’ worth of plastic bags for three people.

Some of it was wrapped around vegetables from the supermarket. Some of it was peeled off the lids of yogurt and soup and sour cream containers. Some was used to transport cables, or batteries, or zipties, or bread, or bars of soap. There are bags in here from restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies, gas stations. A surprising amount of it was packing material that arrived in the mail.

One night I stuffed it all into my bike trailer and pedaled it out to the recycling kiosk outside the Safeway.

I don’t know where it goes from there, but I hope at least that it stays out of the ocean.

The big bucket back at the house remained empty for about two days. Then I received a piece of junk mail – a catalog – wrapped in plastic. The plastic went into the bucket.

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Stress sucks.

May 15, 2012 by Filed under Advice, Stress

Enter a period of psychological stress, and your organs release a steady river of hormones, telling the cells in your body to burn more energy. After a few days of this feedback, your cells begin sending signals to all the mitochondria living inside them, telling them to divide, increasing energy capacity. This is important because when the energy production system is bottlenecked, little chemical packets called “free radicals” are released inside your cells, especially from the struggling mitochondria. Free radicals are damaging to the DNA in your cells, including the DNA of your mitochondria. So having enough mitochondria to avoid a bottleneck is important.

Unfortunately, this is a paradox. When your mitochondria are overworked, it’s like running an engine too hot. Free radicals are the equivalent of smoke coming out of the engine compartment. To address the problem, your mitochondria reproduce by dividing, making more to share the load. … But some of your mitochondria have been damaged by running too hot. When they make copies of themselves by dividing they pass the damage along to their offspring. Eventually, there are more damaged mitochondria inside your cells than clean ones, and the whole operation of the cell becomes degraded because of the extra resources this consumes.

As the mitochondria decline in efficiency, the cell will shift across the spectrum of genes it can express, to devote more resources to mitochondria recycling. This reduces the cell’s effectiveness as part of a functioning organ. (Stem cells and heart cells do not divide their mitochondria, and therefore are not directly under the influence of this cycle, but they can still suffer from the decline of other organs.) Each cell also has a feedback loop of signals inside it, designed to detect this degradation. When a cell in your body realizes it has dropped below a reasonable efficiency level, it commits suicide, removing itself and its damaged mitochondria from your collective internal gene pool.

Yes! Your own cells sometimes kill themselves because they can’t keep up.

Here’s what this means for you, on a human scale: When you pass through a cycle of stress, part of you dies off while the rest of you decides to repopulate, spreading slightly less efficient mitochondria throughout your tissues, resulting in a subtly decreased energy level. You really begin to notice it in middle age.

This effectively cannot be reversed, because you can only work with the genetic supply of mitochondria that you have. Your best hope for renewed health is to maintain a higher set-point for energy capacity, via a higher standing population of your current mitochondria, so that when you are pressed into high-stress situations, you do not logjam your energy supply chain and create damaging free-radicals.

In other words, sufficient sleep, complete nutrition, and consistent aerobic exercise places your body into its most long-lasting mode. It delays the onset of virtually ALL late-life diseases. This may seem like common knowledge, but now you understand why it is so…

And why there is absolutely no product, service, or diet that can turn back the clock. Your very best outcome is to slow it down.

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