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Bagged "The difference between fiction and
reality? The day dawned a grim green. "I hope that's not an omen of things to come," I said, peeking out the tent door. We slipped onto the still-sleeping streets and headed for Mirabel airport, a mere 14 kilometres away. We had plenty of time to catch our early evening flight. Or so we thought. In the next town, I spied a sign on a restaurant promoting a 99¢ breakfast special. "Wow!" I yelped. "We've gotta stop. When's the last time you had breakfast for under a buck?" "Never," came the reply. I tried the door. Locked. No lights. No hours posted. It was 7:30 am. "Hmmm, no wonder they have such a cheap breakfast special. They don't open till noon," I joked. "Sorry, Monsieur, the breakfast special ended at 11." "Do you think we should wait?" Sharon asked, fidgeting, anxious to get to the airport. "Oh, sure," I answered casually. "They probably open at 8." A large woman, bundled in an even larger coat to ward off the early morning chill, strode purposefully down the sidewalk. Upon reaching the restaurant she riffled through her purse, pulled out a key, and unlocked the door. "What time do you open?" I asked. "Seven," she admitted sheepishly. We followed her in. "Sit anywhere you like," she said, flipping a switch and illuminating the empty restaurant. The smell of fresh-perked coffee floated through the air. "Thank goodness for timers," she sighed, slipping off her jacket and hanging it on a tree rack by the front door. I hoped the lack of patrons didn't indicate lack of quality. Sharon and I settled into the best seats in the house as the waitress-chief-cook and bottle washer brought over a coffee pot and filled our mugs. "What's your breakfast special?" I asked. "Two eggs any style, bacon, hash browns, toast, and coffee." "Make mine over easy, please," Sharon said. "May I order two?" I asked. "Certainly," came the reply. "What a country!" I said. Little did I know it would be our last good thing of the day. When my plate arrived with its four eggs, mountain of grease-fried potatoes, and strips of bacon, Sharon took one look and announced, "Looks like a coronary on a plate."
After our filling breakfast, we followed a recommended bike route to the airport, pedalling at no more than ten kilometres per hour - we had plenty of time and we didn't want to work up a sweat. "Nothing worse than sitting on a six-hour flight next to someone with stinky underarms," Sharon said. "Yeah," I agreed. "It's even worse when they're not mine." We rode and we rode, but we didn't get any closer to the elusive airport. It was so tantalizingly close - and yet so far! The bike route led us in a lazy loop around the entire airport. "I'm sure we've seen it from all four sides," Sharon groused. When we arrived at noon, our day-trip meter registered an astounding 38 kilometres! But even with our circuitous route, we still had plenty of time before our scheduled 6:40 pm flight. "We're finally here!" Sharon shouted, pulling to a stop in front of the entrance. She glanced at her odometer. "After 8,179 kilometres," she said, "we're about to embark on our first overseas adventure." "France, ready or not, here we come!" I shouted. We were about to discover that France was not ready. We entered the terminal and approached the airline desk to get our on-hold tickets. "You can't pick them up until 3:30 pm," a belle brunette informed us. "Over there," she added, pointing to a check-in counter across the terminal. "We have bikes," I mentioned. "Do you have bike bags?" "We have them," she answered. "If you want bike bags, just ask when you check-in." I thanked her. Sharon and I went and sat down in sculpted plastic chairs to relax a minute. No sense getting ready too soon, I figured. When the clerk we had spoken to went on break a half-hour later, I approached the new clerk and double-checked on the status of our tickets. The new clerk happily echoed the first, stating that we picked up our tickets at the check-in counter at 3:30. We strolled outside the terminal for fresh air, waiting for our appointed hour to roll around so we could find out whether we actually had tickets or not. I sat on a bench and read. Sharon determined it an opportune time to clean her bike. An old T-shirt she had liberated from a roadside ditch was perfect for the task. She worked the rag around and around her wheels, polishing rims and spokes until their chrome surfaces gleamed in the sun. I could have done the same, but why bother, I figured. They would just get dirty again. For the next two hours, Sharon worked diligently. The airport was as quiet as a ghost town on a Sunday afternoon. It seemed that we and employees were the only ones around. An officious white-haired crossing guard paced back and forth at a pedestrian crosswalk - definitely the Maytag man of crossing guards. He had nothing to do. When an infrequent pedestrian made an appearance, he raised his arm and held out his sign with extravagant gusto - signalling for all traffic to stop - except there wasn't a single vehicle in sight for a country mile. It was so quiet I wondered if we had failed to hear about an airline strike (we joked that while cycle touring we were sometimes so out of touch with world events that WWIII could have broken out and we wouldn't have known it). Without warning, at 3:25 pm, mayhem broke loose. Several fully loaded buses roared to a halt in front of us. Hordes of passengers disgorged onto the sidewalk, grabbed their neat and tidy luggage, and formed a long queue for Paris. "Hmmm," I frowned. "Maybe we should get ready?" I hadn't expected such an abrupt change of milieu. We got out our six-inch crescent wrench and Allen keys to prepare our bikes. The handlebars turned sideways without any problem. But that was the end of our good fortunes. When I attempted to remove the pedals, they wouldn't budge. Sharon liberally squirted lubricant onto the recalcitrant joints. After waiting a few minutes for the oil to penetrate, Sharon's pedals loosened without much difficulty. Mine, however, were another story. I placed our little six-inch wrench on the connection, and applied pressure. Nothing. The threads were frozen more solidly than an Inuit's tongue on a metal slide in the dead of winter. I placed a foot solidly on the wrench, and - worried something might snap - gave a sharp push downward. Nada. It hadn't budged. Sharon stood on the pedal opposite while I jumped on the wrench - literally. There was an ear-wrenching screech, reminiscent of a rusty barn door creaking open after half a century of non-use, but the pedal loosened. Yahoo! After celebrating with a little happy dance, we attempted the same technique on the second pedal. But when I jumped on the wrench, Sharon popped into the air like some aspiring trampoline artist. And still, the pedal refused to budge. "This isn't going to work, is it?" I admitted after Sharon's fourth or fifth tumbling maneuver. "We're going to have to figure out a different way," Sharon said. She glanced around. "How about that?" she asked, pointing to a nearby iron railing. "Stick the pedal under there. That'll keep it from moving." What did I have to lose? Besides busting a crank arm, that was. I jammed the pedal beneath the railing. It fit like a glove on OJ Simpson. While I held the rear rack, steadying the bike upright, Sharon got into position to jump on the wrench. "Geronimo!" I yelled, as she leaped into the air and onto the wrench. A sound - like Arnold Schwarzenegger breaking his knuckles on some bad dude's face - shattered the stillness. The wrench winged off the pedal and skittered across the sidewalk. I was afraid to look. Had my crank arm survived? I peeked down with one eye closed. Whew! Everything looked all right. Best of all, the stubborn pedal had loosened. Ah, travel. The art of ingenuity and getting to exercise new brain cells. "Um, remind me to put extra grease on the threads when we put them back on," I grinned. The airline had a two-piece luggage limit per passenger. With our bikes counting as one piece, the challenge was to assemble all our remaining gear into two packages. We set to work, combining tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and eight panniers (our handlebar bags would be carry-on) into two largish bundles - all strapped together with an assortment of straining bungees, packing tape, sweat and spit. My finest efforts culminated in an absurd bulky conglomeration. Sharon mused over my handiwork. "They look like inflatable rafts in bondage." I grimaced and hefted my dinghy. "Ugh," I grunted as it squirmed from my grasp. "Sort of like wrestling Jell-O." The airline's weight limit was 60 pounds. We figured it'd be close. I trundled over to a weigh scale for passenger use, and thumped my prodigious package onto the metal table. It tipped the scales at 58 pounds. Sharon's tilted in at a more svelte 55. I chuckled. "Hey," I said, "we could have bought that extra jar of peanut butter, after all." Confident our luggage wasn't overweight I snagged an airport pushcart. It possessed the prerequisite wonky wheel. No matter how I maneuvered the thing, it insisted on venturing only south. (Maybe it was trying to tell me something.) With great difficulty, we shimmied over and stood at the very end of a very long check-in line. Sharon held our bikes while I balanced the precarious jerry-built skyscraper of panniers. After what seemed like hours, a few paces before the check-in counter, an impish lad in front of us groped out and, with the lightness of a feather, touched my helter-skelter load. Like the infamous straw that broke the camel's back, our ragtag collection of panniers, sleeping bags and tent, clattered to the tile floor. Fortunately, no one was injured - at least not permanently. I reloaded our hazardous cargo and succeeded in making it the final ten feet to the counter. Once there, a conundrum confronted me: Why do airlines insist on hiring personnel that weigh less than allowable luggage? A check-in elf with a waist size rivalling an HB pencil dragged one of my slipshod messes onto the official weigh scale. Wrestling the unwieldy package, she scowled, and pointed to a shrinkwrap machine across the terminal. She was suggesting I have them plastic wrapped. Good idea! But before doing so, I asked about our tickets. Alas, they weren't at the counter. The wispy brownie pointed a slender finger toward the desk where I had enquired, twice, hours prior. Leaving Sharon in line at the check-in counter, I dashed to the ticket desk. The clerk - the same one whom hours earlier had told me she didn't have our tickets - slid open a drawer and handed me an envelope. I sighed, thanked her politely, and thought our problems were solved. But I was wrong. I sprinted back over to the check-in counter and handed the airline pixie our tickets. "May I get two bike bags?" I asked. My idea - rather than shrinkwrapping - was to stick our lopsided bundles into the bike bags, thereby effectively containing them. It would be brilliant, saving me the convoluted and risky trip over to the distant shrinkwrap station. I'd send our bikes sans bags - I had faith the airline would scratch and dent our rides regardless of them being bagged, boxed, or securely crated and encased in multiple layers of foam. "We don't have any," came the curt reply. "But...," I stammered. "The woman over there told me the airline had them and to ask for them here." The petite clerk pulled an extremely frowny face, like someone who had just bitten an extremely distasteful lemon. She sputtered something in French to the assistant beside her that I didn't understand. The helper disappeared into the back. The check-in clerk sucked in her cheeks and stood mutely, staring off into space while absently tapping a blue and gold airline pen on the countertop. I couldn't read the pen's inscription, but I was quite certain it didn't say: Service is our middle name. Maybe this was a good opportunity to practice my French? But before I could ask her what the time was, two bike bags magically appeared. I began to stuff our panniers inside. In a frequency best-suited for shattering glass, the clerk shrieked, "For bikes only!" I could tell she was restraining herself from throwing both hands in the air as she pointed to the shrinkwrap machine again. Maybe she got a commission? I returned the bike bags, checked our bikes through, then wheeled my tottering load through a maze of pedestrians to the shrinkwrap attendant. He did a fantastic job, even fashioning handles, which helped marvelously in the manageability department. I wheeled back to the check-in counter with a smug expression. "You must purchase bags for your bikes," the clerk huffily declared as I plunked down our tidy parcels. Huh? Hadn't she been the one whom - only minutes before - stated they didn't have any bags? It was my turn to stare off into space. I returned to earth and gazed at Sharon with a distant look of perplexity. Atlas shrugged. "Pay for them over there," the clerk proclaimed, snapping me out of my reverie, and pointing to yet another counter. "Come back here and show me the receipt," she instructed. "I will return your bikes, you will put the bag on, then you will hand them back to me." A not unpleasant picture of a certain clerk shrinkwrapped arose in my mind's eye. Being a neophyte air-traveler, I hadn't realized I had broken the cardinal rule: Thou shalt not hassle thy check-in clerk. They have surprising powers. Somewhat dazed, I hobbled over to the cashier's counter. A wan smile creased my lips as I recognized the cashier. She was the one who originally told me bike bags were optional. "This doesn't make sense," I whimpered. "What's going on?" "They're better for your bike, sir," she answered. "No, they're not," I blurted. "I've flown before with a bike bag and my bike still got scratched and dented." "You don't want them?" "No," I said, shaking my head. "I don't want them." "Okay," she said. I turned and slouched away, still befuddled as to why this was so difficult. Perhaps my new Mohawk haircut is having an adverse affect? Maybe I should consider a ball cap? The cashier caught up to me ten paces before I reached the check-in counter. "You have to take them," she said, in an almost pleading tone. "They keep other people's luggage from being damaged." "Then you should provide them for free." "You don't want them?" "No!" I said. "Fine," she said. "Good," I said. "Then I won't send your bikes!" "Two bags," I whimpered, perilously close to a sob. I followed her back to the cashier's counter. I paid for two bike bags. I trotted back to the check-in counter and presented the receipt to the frosty clerk. We waltzed through the afore agreed upon exchange. The clerk accepted our bagged bikes, then presented me with a release form, absolving the airline of any responsibility "in case there happens to be damage to your bikes." Terrific. I had to sign a paper agreeing that the airline's baggage gorillas were free to smash our bikes to smithereens. "When are they going to build that bridge across the Atlantic?" I asked Sharon. Our bikes signed away, we proceeded to the boarding area. "I'm sure glad we rarely fly," I grumped. "What a rigmarole." After all that, the flight was delayed. "Time to spare, go by air," Sharon rhymed. We were boarding-area captives. We took seats near the X-ray machine and watched people check through. After observing a succession of suspect males, I whispered to my partner, "I think French men are more effeminate than men in general." "And I think you have an overactive imagination," Sharon replied. She turned just in time to see a fellow run past on tippytoes. An hour later, we received our boarding call and collapsed into padded airliner seats. Jet engines roared. We were off! My exhausted mind refused to fathom that in three short weeks - with 2,000 kilometres to pedal through France, Spain, and Portugal - we were to rendezvous with our cycling buddies in Lisbon. "I hope that's the end of our troubles," I sighed, and gave Sharon's leg a pat. "Moi ossi," Sharon replied, already practicing her French. "But somehow I doubt it." Little did I know at the time, she was right. I closed my eyes and thought back to how our trip had begun. |
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