DAY FOUR
Kaitlyn and I woke up around six, grabbed breakfast (not so much eating as ‘grabbing.’) I took off with the van and trailer, all loaded with bikes (I seem to have been ‘bike drop off guy” a lot on this trip)
Slam kabam whammo and I was off, climbing through the spectacular lower reach of the Grand Tatras, winding up through green forested mountains for two hours and then back down again to our staging area. I checked in with the restaurant and they started making our picnic lunch spread while I pulled all the bikes off the van and trailer.
I set up a snack spread, helped the restaurant staff display the picnic stuff, and awaited the chaos to begin.
The bus arrived and there was the usual swirl of questions answered and tasks performed and the guests were on their way. Liam showed up in his van and took off again to support the bike route on its’ first leg, which goes through a bike path that we can’t follow in the vans, so Liam was to support the route until the bike path began. Meanwhile, I would be taking a 45-minute detour to the place where the bike path ends and meet the group there, then support the next section while Liam caught up. The guests had prepared pack lunches at the restaurant, and would be eating en route, probably in the plains between two of the largest Roma (Gypsy) villages in central Slovakia.
All morning long things went more or less to plan. Jerry (yes, Jerry again) had a flat tire and a Blackberry, and with these two things combined summoned me to come fix it.
We caused a stir through the Gypsy villages – twenty-five bikers and two huge vans covered with still more bikes and gigantic “Thrilling Adventures” Decals were not things that the people of these villages are used to. Huge groups of kids emerged from dusty, garishly decorated buildings and swarmed around us, cheering and yelling and dodging in and out of our whole entourage. When we reached the plains, I came across pretty much the whole group of bikers eating in a field, and pulled over to see how they were doing.
Jerry had a few issues with his bike (it wasn’t shifting properly) and I took out my stand to work on it, and promptly could not fix the sonnofabitch. I’d get it almost right, then over correct something, and then actually made the shifting problem worse. To further complicate matters, Jerry and a small crowd of sandwich – munching guests gathered behind me to “watch a pro work.”
Damn it I just couldn’t do it with all these people watching…hmmmmm…
“Okay, I think I’ve got it,” I said, lying. “I’m just going to take it for a ride and…test it out.” I jumped on it and rode it a ways away. It was still fucked up, I was just waiting until I was out of sight of my guests, then I was going to hop off and fix it. However, we were on a plain, and I had to ride for a good minute before they were out of sight.
I got off and worked on the bike for a while, sitting on the ground, and around five minutes later had it humming along. Sweet. I jumped back on the bike and rode to where the guests were eating.
I gave the bike back to Jerry, and hung out with the guests for a bit. I got a call from Liam, who was a good hour ahead, dropping the luggage off at the next hotel, Hotel U Leva, in Levoca. The guests starting leaving on their bikes, and one of them, Adeline, came up to me and told me she was toast – she wanted to ride in the van with me for the rest of the day.
I racked her bike on top of my van. She got in the passenger seat and I jumped in the drivers’ seat and ok whee let’s go ummm…huh where are my keys?
AND NOW A FLASHBACK AS IT THEN FLASHED ON ME AT THAT MOMENT, SITTING IN THE MIDDLE OF A FIELD IN BETWEEN TWO GYSPEY VILLAGES PROBABLY ONE HUNDRED MILES FROM THE NEAREST CITY THAT WOULD HAVE A TOWTRUCK AND NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT I HAVE NO IDEA WHO TO CALL FOR A TOWTRUCK AND I DON’T SPEAK SLOVAKIAN FOR THAT MATTER BUT I DIGRESS – ON TO THE FLASHBACK:
…Before the trip, as the van was being handed off to Kaitlyn and I by the team that had it before, they gave us only one key (there is usually a backup key).
“Where’s the other key?” I asked.
“Oh, it disappeared like months ago,” The other leader said. “Don’t lose this one! Ha-ha!”
…Haha, I thought, sitting in that gypsy field, is not right. I checked my pockets – nope. I looked around the front of the van – nope. Not hanging around my neck, not under the seats…hmmmm…
“Ummm Robin?” It was my guest, talking at my butt as I groped under the seats.
“Mmmm?” I asked, trying to put on an air of nonchalance and total control of the situation, which was tricky when you’re groping wildly under a van seat.
“Is there something you’re looking for?”
I paused, then came up with “Oh, I just seem to haha have misplaced my spare set of keys somewhere around here…haha?”
She looked concerned. “But there’s another set of keys, right?”
I laughed. “Of course! But I love to have a backup with me at all times, so is it ok if I poke around for my ‘backup set’ for a minute?”
She nodded knowingly. “Of course. It’s always good to have a backup. Why, what would you do in a place like this if you lost your keys?”
“Haha! And it’s not like there’s AAA or anything to bail you out!”
“Haha!”
Oh fuck.
She got out of the van and starting looking around in the tall grass, I dug the entire van out for about ten minutes. Nothing. I was standing on the side of the road, hands on my hips, wondering what I was going to do (I could call Liam, about an hour drive from me, and have him pick me and the guest up, but what the hell was I supposed to do with this van here? Also, I was willing to bet that after an hour and a half that my guest would be less than happy with me.
Suddenly, I had a burst of inspiration. No…I wouldn’t have…there’s no….huh.
I took off running down the road.
“Robin, where are you going?” My guest called after me.
“Oh, just…checking something!” I yelled back.
It took me a few minutes to get down the road to where I thought that I had been working on Jerry’s’ bike – but it was so hard to tell – I mean, on a plain like this EVERYTHING looks the same.
I just picked a spot and started frantically pawing through bushes on the side of the road. No – it was further down the road. I ran further down the road, pawed through more bushes. No- further? I started looking back, and went to a place where I…just couldn’t see the van. Here? I attacked the nearest bush… and came up with my keys.
Holy shit.
They’re on a lanyard that hangs around your neck. They must have been bouncing around and hitting the bike while I worked on it, and I must have taken them off and just set them down “for a minute” and just fucking left them there. There was something else down there, too – my sunglasses!
Sweet.
I ran back up the road, dripping with sweat, and shook my keys at the guest. She gave me a dubious look, but then we were in the van and on our way to the shuttle point.
I arrived at the shuttle spot (another café) quite a bit after the bulk of the guests, but it was ok-those who were going on already left, and those who were shuttling with me were sitting around drinking coffees. I pulled out my ladder and started racking bikes when Jerry came riding up behind me.
“Hey Robin – are you trying to kill me?”
This naturally startled me a little bit. I paused, holding a bike over my head. I had no idea how to respond. “Uh…what do you mean, Jerry?” I racked the bike and climbed down the ladder to face him.
“My water bottle holder came off while I was on a downhill and shot straight into the spokes of my rear wheel.”
I guess that I had a look of sheer horror on my face, because he laughed and patted me on the arm. “Don’t worry, just be more careful about checking the water bottle holders in the future.”
I nodded, numb with the potential disaster, and smiled weakly.
He rode off.
I grabbed another bike, and climbed up to rack that one, too, when Liam pulled up, coming from the opposite direction. He had driven the bike route backward. He climbed out of his van and looked around, counting the guests, then came over to me.
“Hey Robin!” He clapped me on the back. “Is there anyone behind you?”
I told him that no, I had come in after everyone.
“Huh,” he said.
“Why?”
“Well, that means we’re missing four guests, ‘Cause I just left from the hotel, and drove straight here, backwards on the bike route.”
“Oh.”
I racked another bike.
We decided that Liam would push on and support the route, and maybe he had just missed them or something. I would take a different route to the hotel with all of the guests that were done for the day, and then hang there and greet guests as they arrived. Liam was to call me if he still didn’t see the four missing guests, and I would head back out on the route to help him search.
I got to the hotel with a van full of guests, and started trying to unrack bikes and keep an eye of them, as this town has it’s fair share of thievery.
Right away William (the guest whose water bottle I had filled with my camelbak a few days before) came back out of the hotel. It should be noted that William is Mary’s (potty-mouthed Mary) father, but the two of them requested separate rooms. The Hotel U Leva had noted that they had the same last name, and given them a two bedroom, single bathroom suite.
This was not going to fly, William told me.
I asked him to guard the bikes, and went in to talk to the front desk lady, who, it turns out, speaks virtually no English. Through a series of pictures, I conveyed the problem to her. She showed me the suite, assuring me that it was very nice (it wasn’t bad, but I kept showing her our rooming list, which very specifically requested two different rooms for each of them). She made some calls. There was lots of gesturing at me that I didn’t understand.
Finally she conceded that they had just one room left, and we could move all of Mary’s’ stuff up two floors to this room. Of course, their porters had left for the day, she communicated to me. I got the keys, ran to Williams room, took all of Mary’s’ bags out (Mary was still out riding) and hauled them up two flights of stairs. I opened her door.
Holy crap. This room was TINY. Nice, but tiny. I put her bags down and ran down to the front desk.
“Ummm… do you guys have anything…bigger?” (Remember that she barely speaks English and I don’t speak any Slovakian).
“No…that is our only room. And what is problem? She is single, that is single room.”
Uh-oh. I pulled out my clipboard and checked my leaders’ notes for this trip. Under the hotel U Leva it says “make sure they don’t give us rooms 112, 114, 115, etc, etc. They are too small – the guests should have double rooms instead, even single travelers..”
I checked our contract with the hotel. It says the same thing. I checked the rooming list.
All of our single guests were in those rooms.
Holy crap.
I tried to show he the contract but she couldn’t read it, so I asked to see some of the rooms.
The first one I checked was the room of the guest who had the attic room with the misfiring air conditioning unit a few night before.
She again had the attic room, and stuffy as all get out.
Holy crap.
I ran downstairs and told William he could move into his room. The clock was ticking – I could better this situation, but I only had a few minutes to do so – the bike riders could be arriving any minute now.
Still no porters, so I ran to the attic room and moved all of her stuff out. I moved a different single guest into the attic room (someone else could take a turn with the attic) and ran downstairs to ask if they had a fan or something we could put in the room. After they understood me (this took quite some time) they had a conference and decided that yes, there was exactly one fan in the entire hotel.
It was in a double room – one of ours, to be exact.
Were those guests here yet? I asked.
No, they’ve not checked in yet, I was told.
I NEED THOSE KEYS! I said.
I ran upstairs again, got into the double room with the fan, took it out, and ran it to the attic room. I then locked up all the rooms and ran back downstairs.
The couple that was taking the double room formerly with a fan was at the front desk, checking in. I greeted them, and went back outside.
Minutes later, more of the riders trickled in. I got a call from Liam – he had finished sweeping the route and still no sign of the missing guests –what to do? I told him to backtrack again and start checking easy turns to miss and that I would be along as soon as I could get freed up.
I racked another bike. Jerry rode up, greeted me, and went inside. He was back about ten minutes later.
“Robin. I’m sharing a bathroom with someone. This isn’t going to fly – I specifically asked for my own room, and that includes my own bathroom.”
I climbed back down the ladder and asked if he would mind watching the bikes for a second and went back inside. I checked the rooming list again – yep, he was supposed to have his own room.
Back to the front desk. She gave me a weary look, and proceeded to not understand what the problem with sharing a bathroom is. Sigh.
I asked for another room for Jerry.
“You already took our last room.”
I called the other four star hotel in town – they were booked solid.
“Ok – he can have our room.” (Kaitlyn, Liam and I had a huge triple room that we had all been looking forward to). I called the two star hotel next door and booked a room for us, then – no porter – moved all of our bags out of our fourth story room down into the lobby.
Just then Kaitlyn rode in (she had been riding bike support with the last guests to come in) and saw our luggage in a pile in the lobby. She raised an eyebrow at me, but then Jerry came in and and I mouthed “later.” At her. I gave Jerry the keys to our room and he went upstairs. I went to his old room, got his bags, and took them up to our old room.
I then ran downstairs and went out to the van. I got another “No sign of em” call from Liam as the wife of one of them came out, asking where her husband was.
Just then the four missing guests rode up, really, really drunk. They had found the greatest little bar! They stumbled into the hotel.
I stood in front of the hotel with a dazed look on my face for a second, then called Liam with the good news.
We lugged all of our bags to the next hotel, then frantically worked on locking the bikes down for the night, grabbed showers, and ran back to U Leva for dinner, which went really, really well – we got a troupe of local dancers to come perform and the food was great.
To bed!
Whew.
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