November 21, 2024
To the airport
This is a situation we’ve thought and worried about off and on for probably a half a year - how to get our bikes home. If you’ve forgotten, this all stems back to the still enraging fact that our spring flight to Barcelona was altered to add a two day layover in the middle, pushing our arrival in Barcelona out by two days. I didn’t notice it at the time and accepted the proposed modification. The only change possible was to eliminate the gap by departing two days later rather than sit around an airport for 48 hours; but even that cost us.
Worse than the fact that it robbed us of two of our days in Europe, it also meant we didn’t bring the bike suitcases with us because now we were arriving the night before our booked ferry to Mallorca, leaving no time to arrange shipping our suitcases ahead to Nice where we had found a hotel that agreed to store them for 9 months until we arrived there.
Like I said, it still makes me mad thinking about it. And it annoys me too now to realize that we’ve ended up in Barcelona instead of Nice. If we’d realized or decided on that at the time we probably could have brought the suitcases after all and found some hotel here to keep them.
There’s been a lot of discussion about how to solve this problem over the last months. We could buy suitcases in Nice, like we were planning two years ago when UPS permanently lost them on their shipment to Nice. We were saved that time by Suzanne and Janos, who shipped their unused suitcases down to Nice for us - an act of generosity that still warms our hearts.
So buying new suitcases was an option. Another was boxing them or having them boxed, and then figuring out how to get them to the airport. Another was to store them in Nice for the winter and pick them up next spring. Somehow though we stumbled on what we’re doing now - Rachael discovered that the Barcelona airport has a sleep-and-fly hotel inside the international terminal, and also a packaging company, Excess Baggage Company, that allegedly stocks bicycle boxes and packing materials.
So that’s the plan. We’ll take the train today to Barcelona where we’ve booked a hotel, buy boxes at the airport, box the bikes there this afternoon, and then just wheel them down to the check-in desk tomorrow morning. Should work fine, and I confirmed last week that this EBC outlet does in fact have bike boxes in stock.
Still though I worry about what could go wrong, so we check out and leave at about ten for the two hour, two segment train journey to the airport. Examples of what could go wrong that I worry about: the train (nothing else needs to be said here, because the list of things that could go wrong with bikes and trains is endless); or the store may have lied about having boxes on hand. We get an early start so we can hopefully pull together an emergency plan B if one’s needed.
One thing goes wrong right away: we miss our first train by a few minutes because just a block from the hotel Rachael realizes she can’t find her coat and is afraid she left it behind.
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That sounds more serious than it is, because trains leave for the anirport every half hour all day long. After a coatless Rocky returns (she’ll later find it stuffed down in her pannier) we bike the half mile to the train station, pulling in just a minute after seeing our train depart.
No big deal. We ticket ourselves for the next one and cool our jets on the departure platform for a half hour and then have no trouble with boarding or exiting - either on the first train, or on the second one that we transfer to at Barcelona Sants. As good as it gets, bikes-on-trainswise.
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3 weeks ago
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We arrive at the airport somewhere around one and are surprised to find the train’s final stop is Terminal Two, not Terminal One. They’re a couple of miles apart and probably we could have biked there, but there’s a bus shuttle available so we took that. It was terrible. The bus was packed, we’re standing in the open trying to balance ourselves and the bikes as the bus races through one sharp bend after another and lurches us forwards and backwards. If I had to do it again I’d consider biking between the terminals instead.
The experience at the airport also goes more or less as well as could be hoped for. It takes some doing and more than one consultation at information counters but we eventually we find both the hotel and the EBC outlet, at the extreme opposite end of the terminal. In the course of this we give an information agent new information. She had no idea you could buy bike boxes at the airport and had never heard of the Excess Baggage Company before until I showed her a photo from their website:
We start with the hotel, dropping off our panniers and Rachael’s bike there and getting their agreement that we can box and store the bikes overnight with them. And then we walk the short distance to EBC, stopping on the way at an eatery with a surprisingly decent meal for an airport offering. For €18 they offered a fixed price menu with acceptable choices. Not a gourmet meal, the food was already prepared like a cafeteria or buffet, but certainly better than we were expecting.
The Excess Baggage Company came through for us and handed over two full-sized bike boxes for €50 each. They fell down on their selection of packing supplies though, having only a roll of tape to offer at no extra charge. I push the boxes and Rachael pushes my bike back to the sleep-and-fly (we took it with us in case we needed to model it against box size options). And then we crash in our room for an hour or so because we’re both pretty wiped out. I’ve definitely got a cold, and Rachael looks like she’s following my bad example.
An hour or so later I’m up and having at the project. It’s at least easier to think about than I’d imagined because I don’t need to decide on what packing materials to buy - a roll of bubble wrap maybe? Instead I make do with what we have - rubber bands, tape, plastic bags, pannier covers and so on. The brake disks get wrapped with pannier covers, the chain and derailleur get wrapped in plastic bags tied on with lengths of Rachael’s rear rack strap that I had to destroy because it got wrapped into her rear cluster and I couldn’t disengaging it without cutting it up (that’s the third and last time we’re doing this! From now on we’ll use the new, much better straps I found at a bike store in Spain last spring).
The pedals, handlebars and seat post come off, the mast gets collapsed, I flop the boxes on their side and slide the bikes in, tape everything up and call it good. Hope for the best - they’re both going into the shop when we get home anyway.
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3 weeks ago
I was really pretty confident though. Now that we’re back, I’ll scavenge stiffeners from a pair of old bags in our storage unit to replace the cracked ones (the one in the other bag is cracked also). I knew there was a reason I hadn’t thrown them away yet,
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3 weeks ago
Today's ride: 1 mile (2 km)
Total: 4,882 miles (7,857 km)
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3 weeks ago
3 weeks ago
Bringing them home for the winter is the right decision for us though. For one, we don’t really want to start off in Barcelona again next year. More importantly, her BF is really the only bike Rachael likes to ride so we need it here for the winter months. And they both need overhauls, something easier to manage over here.
I’m sure that if/when either of us goes electric we’ll leave them over in Europe for the winter. Neither one of us is quite ready for that yet though.
3 weeks ago
And Portland is surprisingly nice - at least in the downtown area. It’s really significantly cleaner than when we left last spring.
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