Month: May 2017

Lots of men (and some women) dressed in funny clothes with hankies, garlands and sticks, and dancing in public with accompaniment from squeezeboxes, fiddles and flutes.    Must be Morris dancers.   Which means we must be at an English folk festival.   We were assured by a woman in a health foods shop that the Chippenham Folk Festival is the largest in the country.    It didn’t seem all that big, but there were lots of happy folk types all over the place, and we did see an excellent fiddle player and singer named Nancy Kerr in the evening.

On cycling matters, our bikes made it to Chippenham with us, and have now been dispatched to Scotland by courier.    Very exciting.

 

Time to stuff the bikes into their boxes for the big trip.      Our local bike shop gave us the boxes and we studiously watched a video showing how to disassemble the bikes and get them ready to travel.    Looked dead easy.   Piece of cake.    The man on the video appeared to take less than 8 minutes to do the whole thing.

So this morning we got started in the drive way unscrewing things, taking off bits, twisting things around, pulling things out, zip-tying things to other things, and generally making the bikes less bike shaped and more box shaped.

The general idea is that the front wheel and handle bars are taken off and jammed against the frame.    Also, you have to take off the pedals, seat, and any other sticky-out bits.

After an hour I was about ready to neatly drop my bike into its box and retire for a well-earned cup of coffee.     Unfortunately I discovered that the bike was still too long, wide and tall.    Those boxes really don’t leave much any wiggle room.    So it was back to disconnecting, rearranging, twisting, imploring and cajoling.    Second time around, the bike went in the box, but the rack stuck out of the top.    Off came the rack, which I zip tied under one of the wheels.    Third time lucky, and in went the bike.

Margaret had even more trouble than me, so in the end it took us over 3 hours to stuff the bikes into their boxes, ready for their excellent adventure.

I really hope that next time we see them, they’ll still be recognizable as bikes and able to be reassembled.