DAY THREE
During breakfast another one of our guests, a lovely woman named Harriet, mentioned (quite calmly, it should be noted) that her room had been in the attic of the hotel. This wasn’t a problem, she assured us. The room was lovely – it was just really hot and stuffy up there. The hotel had provided her with a portable air conditioner that was supposed to work quite well, she told us. It had, however, broken, and instead of air-conditioning the room, had gotten stuck in its’ “heat” mode.
It had gotten so hot in her room that she had to drag her mattress out into the hallway and sleep there.
I choked on my coffee. Kailyn again looked torn between bursting out laughing and sheer, stark horror. The woman laughed, however, and told us that "it was fine, just part of the adventure. There was no way we could have known this would happen!"
Whew.
I was riding my bike that day, and the morning was pretty fun and laid back. We climbed out of Banska Stiavnica into some lovely forested hills. I rode and talked with some of the guests, I made a few small repairs on bikes that I passed, and right before lunch I found myself riding with a cool single woman named Angela (not my type, or age, you guys. Geez).
We hit the monster morning climb and she started really feeling it, so I unleashed my usual string of motivational banter (I’ve gotten creepily good at that stuff) and we…almost…made…it…to…the…top…when…she fell. Hard, tearing her leg up. I did first aid on her leg, gauzing it and wrapping it, and she said she was fine. We drank some water and rode in to lunch, in the ancient hamlet (I’m sorry that I just wrote “ancient hamlet”) of Kremnica, another little village of churches and wrinkled locals and small shops and a few new hip ones, in a little valley with mountains on three sides and lots of trees.
The guests took off to eat lunch and Kaitlyn, Liam and I put 25 bikes on top of the vans. Kaitlyn and Liam then drove the vans to the next hotel and I got on a bus with the guests.
We arrived in BANSKA BYSTRICA (not to be confused with Banska Stiavnica, the town we had stayed in the night before) at the Hotel Arcade. Banska Bystrica is a lot bigger than B. Stiavica-it’s the largest town in central Slovakia-but it’s also a former silver mining town and has a spectacular main square. Our hotel was right on the square, with long, haunting stairways and a sometimes friendly, sometimes not, staff.
The guests all headed upstairs and the three of us spent some time organizing the vans and trailer then headed upstairs, and Kaitlyn jumped in the shower and our phone rang. It was the front desk – one of our guests was “injured” in the lobby.
I grabbed my first aid kit and headed out, still dressed in my bike clothes.
It was Angela – the guest who had fallen earlier that day. She was sitting in a couch in the lobby of the hotel, quite frankly bleeding everwhere.
I sat down and started doing first aid again. It wasn’t as serious as all the blood would lead one to think at first glance – her wound from earlier that day had simply reopened in the shower, and all I had to do was re-dress and re-wrap the wound.
I headed back to the room and greeted Kaitlyn, who was wondering what happened.
“Same old,” I said.
Dinner was awesome: we ate in an amazing place right across the square while a privately hired string quartet played. The guests headed to bed and Kaitlyn and I shared a quiet beer on the square and watched couples headed to secret destinations and tired men smoke cigarettes and a small group of young folk laugh softly undearneath a fountain that was a monument to communist liberation but is now just a fountain.
Then we went to bed too.
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