October 5, 2017
Day Fifteen: Apeldoorn, Goodbye Bike Friday: (Year 15: 1982)
Flash Back to 1982:
Our time was split between work, with Steve heavily into government statistics and Dodie working as a pediatric nurse, and the farm.
One event we have remembered is when Steve and Dan decided they were tree surgeons. Steve climbed a tree and began to cut off a branch over his head. Dan's plan was to use a rope to pull the branch away once it was cut through. But Steve cut through too fast and the saw came around looking for him. It stopped at his arm, but produced a long lasting scar. Since then we have left tree falling to experts. Tree faller remains one of the most dangerous jobs in the Province.
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The famous Canadian folk singer, Stan Rogers, continued to provide the songs we loved most. His 1979 White Collar Holler was appropriate to Steve's office work, at least.
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Fast Forward to 2017, the Netherlands
There is no doubt that Dodie's Bike Friday took a big hit for her. With a lot of the peripheral parts now off, we could see clearly how it was "tacoed" by being hit amidships. But there is a puzzle to it. The right side crank arm is severely bent in. But Dodie's foot would have been on the pedal at the end of the arm. We just can not see how that foot is not in 100 pieces of broken bone. The crank would not have bent like that just from being thrown. It had to be the hit. Clearly Dodie was inches or less from having no foot. Oh my.
We pushed the Friday along to the bike shop, where they will disassemble it enough to fit in the maximium 100x50x50 cm box accepted by the post office. Then we will ship it to Oregon. We are sure now that the frame is toast. But Bike Friday can use the original measurements and make another. Then they can pop the components back on, and it will just look like the original bike got a paint job. Will the result still be Dodie's old bike? To philosophically answer that you have to be able to also say if the Captain Kirk coming out of the transporter is the same one as went in. Does the distinction matter? We don't know, but there were 18 replies in a forum thread we started here on Crazyguy, called Mourning a Special Bike. So it's not a totally dumb question.
That Forum thread is found in the category "Mental Health", and that's an appropriate category. A shock like a crash will always have a physical and a mental dimension. The two are linked, as well. Your mind needs to pitch in and help the body heal. And the faster the body can heal, the better for the mind.
Dodie (and Steve) are doing very well with this one, we say. But that pedal arm - scary!
Tomorrow Dodie will pick up the new bike, but we will only pedal out of here on Monday. That will make it over a week of "lost" time (sorry, Apeldoorn). We will adjust by taking a short cut. Instead of going up the Maas river to Masstricht and then hanging a left (turning east, past Aachen) to reach the Rhine at Cologne, we will hop on the Rhine directly at Arnhem. We had been avoiding that, because in past we found the lower Rhine (everything from Cologne down to Rotterdam) to be unlovely. But now, we will need to boot it!
One part of our time in Apeldoorn that has not been "lost" has been the chance to interact with the staff here at the Bastion Het Loo hotel. Without exception they have not only been pleasant, but they have gone out of their way to help, and to ask after how we are doing. Today in the breakfast room we had a good example of that. The young lady who was preparing hot egg dishes asked why we were staying at the hotel. In hearing the reason, she said "Why didn't you tell me!" We were then able to have a conversation with her, and found that she was a student from Romania, in a hotel management program.
We learned about what subjects she is studying, about her Dutch boyfriend, about learning Dutch, about her impressions of cycling in Netherlands, and so forth. One might think that is a pretty routine or mundane interaction, but we think not. We want to understand the lives of everyone we encounter, and we value it when someone makes "contact". It's part of the benefit of travel, for us, and for them.
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