Pow so Van Support was over.
At the end of my van support trip, in Krakow (did I mention that this may be the coolest city in the world?), Renee caught a flight out of there (she was working in Prague next) and Kaitlyn and I drove the vans back to Budapest (which takes about seven hours) and got ready for our trip.
We had four days ‘off’ but we spent them all working. We made copies. We got a broken van fixed. We made maps and plans and drank beer and went on runs.
We did food runs for the trip, we washed the heck out of our vans, we prepped the bikes.
A SPECIAL NOTE ON BIKE PREP
This is the time before the trip that you go through every mechanical aspect of the bikes, to make sure that they’re running smooth as silk. I’ve been over this before, but in Tuscany we do this on the Thrilling Adventures warehouse floor, surrounded by bike stands, bike tools, the whole shebang.
In Budapest, there was just the Big Red Box outside the hotel Silvanus.
We pulled the bikes from the Box and began to work as storm clouds rolled in. There was nowhere inside the Box for us to work, so we worked outside, in the parking lot. After an hour of work (bike prep takes a long time when there are like 24 bikes to prep), it began to rain-and rain hard. Kaitlyn and I looked at the storm clouds, moved our gear underneath a tree with particularly big leaves, and kept working through the storm.
There was no other time to do it.
Every now and then, when we’d finished our work for the day, Kaitlyn would suggest going on a run or bike ride.
I only took her up on this offer once, because I hurt myself-badly-trying to keep up with her through the green valleys of the Danube Bend. It turned out that she was this like crazy exercise guru, and liked to do runs for like THREE HOURS.
I never made that mistake again. I’d do my runs by myself, thanks. (Also, that way I could listen to Andrew W.K. while I ran, and give passing old Hungarian women Andrew W.K. looks, which must be rather frightening).
Our van support driver arrived at 11 at night before the trip rolled. He was a huge, sprightly Irish guy named Liam who had been living in San Francisco for seven years.
He made lots of Irish jokes and, in typical Irish fashion, was a charming motherfucker. (Not to stereotype the Irish. I just, well, have never really met a young Irish guy who isn’t sort of charming. Um…) We had some pints and pizzas (Hungarian Pizza: Actually pretty Damn Good) going over the plans with Liam and headed to bed.
DAY ONE
We were up at six o’clock sharp to get the routine cracking. I hopped in the van that had been loaded with snacks, gear, and all the bikes and drove it to the town of Szentendre, a cool little riverside hamlet right on the Danube (and a two-hour boat ride north of Budapest).
The idea was that Kaitlyn and Liam were going to head into Budapest and meet the guests at the Hotel International. Liam would load all the luggage into his van and take off for our night one hotel, Kaitlyn would then board a private boat with all twenty three guests, then spend two hours on the boat pointing out sights on the river and giving talks about the upcoming nine days. They would get off the boat in Szentendre and meet up with me at the dock, then we would walk together to a cool stone courtyard to find all of their bikes gleaming in the sun, snack tables and water bottles and everything set up.
Oh yes, we’re very good.
At least, we’re supposed to be…
I arrived at Szentendre and unloaded all the bikes, set up the snacks, helmets, etc (They all are supposed to go in little bins that have signs that say aggressive things like “ENERGY BARS: EAT BEFORE YOU BONK, DRINK BEFORE YOU GET THIRSTY, REST BEFORE YOU GET TIRED!”)
A VERY SPECIAL MESSAGE ABOUT THE WORD ‘BONK.’
It doesn’t just mean have sex. Really! There’s this really nerdy bike usage of the word that means “to run out of energy ‘cause you need to eat something.”
…which I guess could be sexual.
cough
...I finished with all of that stuff, then jumped in the van (it was raining again) to study a sheet covered with local history before the boat arrived with Kaitlyn and the guests. (In the history I learned, there was a castle being blown up involved. I can’t remember a whole lot else at this point.)
The guests rolled in and we helped them get their bikes all ready to go. All the guests went in to eat lunch and I was supposed to watch all the bikes and stuff and I got distracted helping a guest (Let’s call her Mary) with her bike.
“FUCK! FUCK THIS FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!” Mary would scream into the otherwise tranquil morning, her new bike computer popping out of the piece that was supposed to hold it. “Maybe….try it like this?” I would suggest, picking the computer off the ground. “Ok,” she’d grumble, taking the small black computer part from my hands. Moments later it would fly off again. “MOTHERFUCKER!” Mary would scream, as I went for the piece on the ground. “FUCKING CUNT!"
Another guest, Jerry, turned to Kaitlyn at this point and said “Thrilling Adventures might be losing my business pretty soon.”
Mary and I finally got the bike computer installed, and then I walked her to lunch.
Another guest then came over in the restaurant and yelled at me for a while about leaving her stuff unattended in the courtyard so I made up a story about this crack team of security guards that were watching our stuff for us, and that satisfied her and she wandered back out. I went out to watch the bikes at this point.
All the guests got on the road, Kaitlyn set to work rapidly cleaning up all of our tables, and I hopped on my bike after all the guests had left...except Mary. I asked Mary if she wanted to ride with me a bit, and she consented.
We had to get off our bikes for a little while to walk through a cobblestoned part of Szentendre, and then we came to a part where we could ride again. I mentioned this to Mary and hopped on my bike.
I had been riding for a few seconds when I realized that she wasn’t with me at the time. I stopped and looked back. She was struggling with her clip-in pedals (you know, when bikers are wearing those funny shoes that have clips on the bottom that actually clip into the bike pedal), so I rode back and drank water and waited. She was getting all angry again. Man, this woman could swear. It wasn’t so much her word choice (I’ve heard the “F” word before. Hell, I use it), it was the sheer, spectacular intensity, frequency, and volume with which this woman would swear when frustrated. I’ve never seen anything like it.
“FUCK!” She yelled, trying to get the clip on her shoe to slide into the pedal. She put her foot down for balance for a few moments, and then tried to shove off …
Let me take a moment, before the following disaster, to clarify something: you have to clip in while you’re moving forward, ‘cause if both feet are clipped in, then you can’t have them on the ground for balance. To get yourself “unclipped,” you have to move your foot sideways on the pedal, which is not always the most instinctive thing to do while you’re about to crash or need to put your foot down quickly.
So Mary Crashed. She was clipped in on one side, and was trying to get her foot in the other side, and it just wouldn’t go in.* I was sitting on my bike behind her, and had the buttinbiketights point of view she she went over, slowly and agonizingly, onto the pavement.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!
…was about how the fall sounded.
She jumped up and scorched the very surface of the earth with a remarkable spray of bad words. I didn’t ask if she was ok (that’s one of those falls that hurts your pride more than anything else), I just waited a bit, and then told her a story about when I went over slowly and agonizingly a few trips before. This made her cheer up a bit (at least she stopped swearing at insanely high volumes) and we rode on.
I got a bit ahead of her at some point. I was riding along, enjoying the brisk-just rained feel to the air, when I came to a part of our typed out directions that said, “walk your bike around the car barrier and continue on the bike path.”
When we wrote the directions, there was a barrier. Now, the barrier was gone, i.e. the guests would be looking for a turn that wasn’t there.
Siiiiiiiiigh.
I rode around the bike path area, rounding up vaguely confused bike riders, passed Liam who was waiting at our first shuttle spot, then Kaitlyn , who was at the second shuttle spot, and then rode into the hotel with the rest of the riders, riding up the last hill with a cool European couple (we almost never get Europeans on our trips, who don’t understand why Americans would need so much help to be on vacation. Well, we just do, ok? Geez.)
That night we had a big welcome dinner, during which I was supposed to give a talk about the logistics of the trip. I had taken meticulous notes that I was going to use to give my talk, and promptly forgot to bring them with me...so I winged it. I actually did pretty well, and sat next to Mary at dinner, who was now cheerfully eating ice cream and telling profanity laced lesbian stories to a few of our more conservative guests.
After dinner, Kaitlyn and I hit the kitchens to prep our picnic lunch for the next morning (it can take HOURS to prep a Thrilling Adventures picnic, which is pretty fancy) and hit the sack around midnight.
So far, so good. Day Two is when I started making mistakes.
*That’s what she said. Oh!
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