Day: June 18, 2018

It’s Monday morning and we’re almost ready to get rolling. Saturday Greg and I got to Brussels right on schedule, but our bikes missed their train and had to come on a later one. Yesterday we met up with Greg’s cousin Joe and his wife Tammy, who live in Brussels. They took us out for breakfast and showed us around town for a while before we had to catch the first of a series of trains to Germany. On one exciting train transfer Greg got yelled at in German for almost touching another cyclist’s (presumably expensive) bike.Koblenz is beautiful, and we had a great night at a campsite on the Mosel River.We found a cute cafe that does a vegan cheese-and-deli-slices breakfast, and then we’re heading out along the Rhine for the rest of the day. Los geht’s!

I was a little trepidatious about my plan to forego the bike box and just put my bike on the plane in a large plastic bag – because my bike is so large, it’s hard to find a box but enough\n for it, plus it usually takes at least an hour to disassemble/reassemble it. With the bag method, I could just ride my bike to the airport, pop off the pedals and handlebars, and I was good to go!

Thankfully, the bike arrived unscathed. The only issue was that I had removed my rear derailleur in order to protect it, and somehow knotted up my chain while putting it back on. This resulted in me sitting on a train with bike grease up to my elbows trying to figure out how my cable ended up routed through my chain. But I made the connection with Erin without issues, even though my flight was an hour late, and the train from the airport was twenty minutes late.