Down time is up time

October 8, 2018 to October 9, 2018

Valencia is a beautiful, vibrant city with a lot more historical interest than I had expected. I’m actually excited to visit the Valencia Nord train station tomorrow after getting a sneak peak of it today. I’m sure we will have mixed feelings bidding farewell, but we must move forward and inland to parts as yet unknown to us.

At some point we discovered that October 9 is a holiday, or “fiesta”, in Valencia. This put more pressure on us to take care of errands on our first day.

This reminds me: we have had a string of bad luck with losing things. Sunyoung lost one of her sandals and had to toss out the orphan as well. This led to a joke whenever we saw footwear on the road (which is an oddly common occurrence): Is it left or right? Left? Why did we throw out your other sandal? We would have had a pair now!

I also lost my glasses case, and something else I can’t remember at the moment. In addition, Sunyoung’s handlebar bag mount is broken beyond repair, and is about to come off all together. One of her pannier hooks is broken. And her rear tire was worn almost to the casing. So far all we have taken care of is the tire.

This is a good segue to a strange bike shop encounter. We go to this place that seems to have a pretty good business both renting and repairing bikes. The former is important because everyone at the shop speaks decent English. I had no idea how difficult it was to talk about bike parts in Spanish. It’s not just the parts — which we mostly have down — it’s also the verbs that describe what the parts are failing to accomplish. Sunyoung’s shifter was chirping whenever she changed gears. My derailleur indexing was off no matter how much I tried to adjust it.

The shop has only one mechanic. He came over and checked my chain, which he declared to be way beyond the max stretch length. I checked it just before the trip and it still had a few hundred kilometers left in it. This has happened to me before. I think shops carry more conservative chain wear gauges so that they can sell more chains and cassettes. A rather intense exchange ensued in which I told him he could replace my chain but not the cassette. He insisted that the cassette had to be toast because, in his gauge’s opinion, the chain was toast. I got 25000km out of my last cassette using my chain wear gauge as a guide.

So after hashing all this out, they say they will call us with an estimate. We enjoy a day as tourists, but start getting anxious, as they have not called. We stopped by the shop at 6:00, and they were surprised to see us. The bikes wouldn’t be ready until Wednesday! We said, but you never called us like you said you would! We asked for our bikes back as-is. They said my bike was already on the repair stand. We said, ok, why don’t we come back before you close and we’ll see if you’re done? They grudgingly agreed.

So we return at 8:00 and they say the bikes are ready. Great! I asked them about the new tire. “Oh, we didn’t have time for that.” I asked about the new chain. “We decided that you didn’t need a new chain after all.” OK, fine, whatever. Sell me the tire then. That’s the only real urgent thing. Again, grudgingly, they get the tire. It’s like they don’t want to make any money. So I buy the tire, they don’t charge us anything for labor, and to be honest I can’t tell whether they even touched either bike. However, my bike seems to be shifting better, and Sunyoung’s shifter squeak is gone, for now at least.

Today we got to be tourists on our bikes, but some streets were blocked off for the Valencia Day festivities, while the rest were crowded with pedestrians. But it did make it easy for us to visit the Arts and Sciences Center, which was on our must-see list.

We returned in time to see the big parade, which was delayed by a brief but powerful burst of rain. We had no idea how long the parade would last. We severely underestimated the number of Valencians who had Moorish and Knights Templar costumes sitting in their closet. It was almost 8:00 before we gave up and started seeking ways around the parade route.

We returned to the apartment to take care of another important errand: laundry! We found a fully-automated laundromat — an automat, if you will. I think that’s what it was called, actually.

I’m really starting to ramble here. I’d better wrap things up. Tomorrow morning we try to replace Sunyoung’s handlebar bag, and if we’re lucky, find the proper size wrench and a washer to repair her pannier. Then it’s off to Albacete.

Changing tires was supposed to be a snap, but the new Schwalbe is a bigger tire than the Continental. This forced me to make some fender adjustments

Beautiful wife on a beautiful bike in a beautiful city

Locals may not care for this place but we were impressed

Today's ride: 40 km (25 miles)
Total: 434 km (270 miles)

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