Evacuation

We have to check out from the unit by eleven.  With our abundance of available time, the plan is that we’ll order an XL Uber vehicle to pick us up soon after and drop us off at the airport before noon.  We’ll get checked in then go find lunch at one of the many great food options available at PDX, which must be one of the great airports of the world.  I especially value their policy of disallowing price markups - you can get your latte from Starbucks or your glass of wine or a fine meal for the same price here as you would outside.

In a rare prescient moment though, we decide it might be smarter to hold off reserving a ride until we’re actually out of the unit.  You never know.

I’m sorry now that I didn’t think to take a photograph of the wall leading up to to the door to the unit, but it’s filled for the entire length with an organized series of heaps.  Next to the door is trash and recycling, destined for the trash room on the ground floor.  Further up the wall is a heap of objects we’ve agreed are to be taken across the street to the storage unit.  Next, the two bike suitcases, both open.  The bikes are both loaded, but the suitcases are left open so we can drop anything else in that will fit well.  Bulky objects like shoes and water bottles and the like typically fill the crevises.

Behind that is the final pile of objects to be taken on the flight, waiting to be packed into the travel containers: the suitcases, four panniers, and our carry-on luggage. 

There are three dynamics at play here.  One is to evacuate the unit with the final loose objects scattered around in closets and on chairs or end tables that haven’t made it to the wall yet.  One by one they drift in, like the last crows coming in from around the county to alight on their roosting tree for the night.

Another dynamic is packing, which is a more complicated problem than it sounds like.  Everything needs to fit of course, but complicating everything is that objects that can’t make it past TSA and be taken as carryon need to land in one of our three pieces of checked baggage: the two suitcases, and a plastic bag with my two panniers inside, along with the helmets and whatever else doesn’t fit elsewhere.

And finally, there’s the dynamic of cleaning the unit sufficiently to satisfy our checkout instructions.  As I’m consolidating, packing, and moving the whole train toward the door to clear up more space, Rachael’s coming behind wiping down surfaces, sweeping the floor and washing the dishes.

It’s a reasonably well organized process really, but it’s not a fast one.  We’re close but don’t make it.  At 11:00 nothing at all has left the unit yet, not even the garbage.  So I open the door and move the whole train out into the hall, preserving its order.  By 11:05, we’ve evacuated the unit, but we’re awfully glad we don’t have an Uber driver waiting for us downstairs.

To the airport

A half hour will be enough though, so while Rachael orders a lift for 11:30 I take the trash downstairs and then start painfully, slowly moving the storage unit heap down the hall to the elevator.  Slowly and painfully because somewhere between yesterday and today I’ve done something to my right knee and can hardly walk at all.  It’s a real problem, and it’s a problem for both of us because it will be all I can do to get this heap down the hall and loaded into the elevator, emptied out on the ground floor, across the lobby to the front door, out the door and lined up on the sidewalk, and finally across the street to the storage unit where I can load it onto a cart and take it up the elevator to our storage unit on the third floor.

Which means it leaves poor Rachael to manage the same thing with the final pile, getting our luggage down to the sidewalk to load into the Uber when it arrives.  My task is awkward, slow and painful.  Hers is just hard, with all three of the carryons weighing 50 pounds each.  The suitcases have wheels of course, but the plastic bag is a pretty awful thing to lug around.  Plus there are the four carry-on items, two of which aren’t particularly light either.

I’m finally at the storage unit when Rachael calls.  Uber offers two large vehicle options - a four seater van or a six seater.  Both are available and in the vicinity, so she asks my advice.  Stupidly, I say the four seater should be fine, but when he arrives he looks at the mountain, shakes his head, and the six seater is called.  We’re lucky we didn’t get charged for the first call.

It’s not two minutes later that Rachael calls to tell me to hurry because the new driver is here already.  But I can’t unfortunately because I can’t use the elevator.  It’s stuck upstairs somewhere, someone apparently having left the elevator door ajar and then walked down the stairs.  It takes awhile for a staff member to go upstairs to figure out where it’s stuck so I can call it down.

So once it comes I’m really feeling the time pressure.  I quickly wheel the cart to our unit, dump the objects in, and lock the door behind me.  It goes quickly, with me appreciating being able to use the cart as a walker.

If I hadn’t been in quite such a rush though I might have looked up while I was shoving things into the unit and seen my handlebar bag, the one I bought to take to Europe to carry the new camera in, staring me in the face.  I remembered that I’d forgotten it on the Rodriguez yesterday and went for it and a few other things, but forgot to pick it up at the last minute.  Phooey.

Dumb, but this is actually a vision thing.  One recurring and maddening thing here is that I am constantly misplacing things.  I’ll set down an object somewhere and then look around for it and be completely unable to find it.  Either it’s on my blind side, or I’m standing at an angle where it doesn’t look the same and I don’t recognize it. It’s only an issue with objects close at hand, where my lack of depth perception especially causes a problem.  Beyond about ten feet everything is fine, but while I’m packing it really is maddening - enraging, really.  I haven’t done this much audible, profane cursing in quite a while.

And I know I have no place to whine, but between my knee and the vision thing this is the hardest packing job ever.  It’s a labor to walk, it’s a worse struggle to get down on the floor to work on something and then realize I’ve screwed up again and found myself in a spot where there’s nothing around to grab so I can pick myself up again.

So that’s a theme that will carry us through all the way to Italy, where it gets in the way making it to check-in, to security, to the departure gate, to the taxi upon landing, to our Airbnb, and then once there reshuffling Everything to sort what’s staying in the suitcases and what’s going on the road.  Its all hard, and I won’t mention it again.  Let’s just say I’ll be so damn glad to finally be on the road with the bikes and the fun can begin.

At the airport 

We have wonderful Uber driver, an older man when grew up in Trapani, Sicily before emigrating to New York and finally settling in Portland where he’s lived for many years.  This is one of the best type of Uber experiences, with an engaging driver with an interesting story to tell.

We’re flying Air Canada again, a two stopover itinerary consisting of a short hop to Vancouver, an overnight to Munich, and a short hop to Bari.  There’s virtually no line at the check-in counter, and we have a very helpful agent waiting to assist us.  Unfortunately we have a new problem, one that hasn’t happened before.  My bike typically weighs in at about a pound under the limit but today I’m five over.  Something needs to come out.  We’re carrying more weight this time, mostly in restock items like pills, dietary supplements and so on that we’ll leave behind in the suitcases between seasons.

So stuff needs to come out.  And in major brain fart #1 I don’t think about what I’m removing.  It’s only through dumb luck that the only thing that gets confiscated at security is a corkscrew with a knife blade.  An easy thing to replace, but it could have been so much worse.

But we make it through security and soon make our way to Grassa, an Italian  restaurant that’s also in our neighborhood in town that we’ve always been tempted to try out.  We’ve got nearly two hours until departure, so we settle in for an excellent meal and I’m really delighted to find that they have an NA IPA.  And it’s not just any NA IPA - it’s Heck, and it’s brewed here in Portland!  It’s one of the first NA breweries in the Pacific Northwest, started in 2023 by a partnership of the founders of the old Hopworks Brewery and XOXO.  

And in major brain fart #2, we forget to set an alarm and nearly miss our flight.  It’s a total shock when I look at the time on the iPad and see we’re 20 minutes from departure and our gate is at the far end of our concourse. They’re undoubtedly already boarding.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Rachael rushes ahead to let them know we’re here and I’m limping as fast as I can.  We’re the last ones to board, and when the agent sees me coming they pull out a wheelchair and arrange for me to be met by one at the other end and the other 2 flights we have.  It’s a blessing!

Flight

The long leg to Munich is as uneventful as you’d like an overseas flight to be.  We’re in a center aisle but lucky that the third seat is vacant so we can spread out and don’t have to crawl over someone to get to the loo.  I manage to sleep more than usual, but Rachael stays up long enough to watch and enjoy The Brutalist.

There’s only one other thing to say about this otherwise fine Lufthansa flight - there’s a dinner and breakfast serving and both are really terrible.  And bland, bland, bland.  They desperately need salt and pepper, and when Rachael asks for some she’s told it’s kept on the drink tray, which makes its way about fifteen minutes later.  So bizarre.

The wheelchair is waiting for me in Munich, which really is a blessing - for the first me at least, but not for the poor woman trying her best to push me steep slope at the off ramp.  After that I’m transferred to a three person cart.  I sit in the back with a a chatty  woman with her own mobility problems (she had a total knee replacement a half year ago and was doing fine until she wrecked it helping a friend move a mattresss).  Rachael hops on the front, and we finally make it to our departure gate after three or four transfers - onto a chair again and down an elevator that can only handle one chair at a time, then onto a different cart.  Through customs, then onto a different cart.  It’s slow, but it’s really nice to be ushered through like this, especially when we have a fairly tight connection.  I suspect I’ll opt for chair assistance in the future.

Some scenes from the road:

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