Angel was telling me about how he hadn’t ridden his bike in years. It had been more than a decade, but for his wife it had been even longer – maybe more than 20 years. Still, he told me, he knew it was the best form of exercise.
“En Inglés …,” he began each stream of words by saying. My driver to the airport, a native of Cuba, hadn’t yet mastered English. So we communicated through Siri. On the outskirts of Portland, I listened carefully as a calm, robotic voice translated Angel’s fond feelings toward cycling into something I could understand.
We had started chatting after Angel asked what was in the large black bag I had just loaded into his trunk. It was my first time packing my bike for the plane, and overall it had gone well. I used the Thule Roundtrip bike bag. While the price of the equipment made my jaw drop at first (it cost almost as much as my bike did off the rack), the integrated stand ultimately made it worth it.
My trip to Portland was a test run, a trial to see if actually packing my bike all the way to Korea – as I’m planning to do this fall – is something that seems actually feasible.
As a software developer, the idea of testing before a deployment comes naturally; you rarely want to be trialing new behavior for the first time in production. The trick is getting your test environment to mirror production as much as possible. So while I could have just practiced packing and unpacking my bike in my back yard, it seemed prudent to go through the whole travel process – notwithstanding that PDX isn’t even two hours from SFO.
Mostly, I got green bars. I did a short ride the first day down a section of the Willamette River and back, going about 10 miles. On the following Saturday, I went far to the east of Portland along the Columbia River, logging about 70 miles by the time I made it back to downtown. There were some beautiful stretches along Marine Drive and the Historic Columbia River Highway. I turned back after I reached the Portland Women’s Forum State Scenic Viewpoint.
It was only after I was back in my hotel that I discovered I hadn’t fully tightened my handlebar stem – yikes! I resolved to made a reassembly checklist after that.
There were some other learnings as well:
Plan ground transport ahead. I booked “XL” ride share options ahead of time, which took out some of the anxiety and made it easy to load my bike case into the car when the drivers showed up.
Clean and oil your drive train before packing up. My chain had been dry before I took off, and it began to squeak so badly somewhere around mile 50 of my second ride it felt like it was coming from my bones.
Plan on finding a bike pump. I mostly deflated my tires before packing my wheels, in part because I was worried about the pressure on the airplane. But pumping them back up to a rideable pressure with a hand pump alone was tough. I stopped by a bike shop long enough to use their pump and get back up to around 80 PSI.
Plan to adapt your route. Nothing can substitute for seeing conditions on the ground, even with the best GPS apps. It was necessary for me to switch up my plans multiple times as I rode through unfamiliar territory.
The trip was a good excuse to revisit Portland after many years. It felt like it had changed a lot since pre-COVID times – and not, I hate to say, much for the better. But the problems I observed, as someone just briefly passing through, are those that seem to be dogging America’s cities everywhere. I also saw the genuine, civic-minded side that Portland is otherwise well known for. As I descended Mt. Tabor, I spotted a cyclist who had stopped his ride to pick up the shards of a bottle that someone had broken in the road.
Overall, I wound up my journey feeling more confident about the upcoming trip to Korea. Some more practice with the mechanics is probably in order, not to mention more training on the bike. I felt a sense of gratification when I saw I had gone more than 60 miles on my ride. Then I realized: I’ll need to do that for almost seven days in a row on my tour.
Oh well, it’s good exercise! How do you say “tired” in Spanish?