Call Me Lance

Since I now live a 30 minute walk from my office, I really need a bike.  Making such a purchase in my village isn't possible, so I took a bus to the regional capital and met another similarly-inclined PCV in the bazaar and we went to buy our bikes together.

After trying out a bunch, I settled on a pretty souped up model that is unfortunately a tad too small.  There really wasn't anything available with a frame big enough for my lanky 6' body, but with the seat jacked all the way up it gets the job done.  There were actually some models that would have been a better fit, but they had only one gear and no hand-brakes - only the old-fashioned "back-pedal" brakes.  Despite the fact that I purchased the bike to get places faster, I figured it was more important that I be able to stop than go , so I had to go with the hand-brake model.  I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have a car that only went up to 3rd gear than one without any brakes...

Now we enter the part of this entry where I go from reasonable investment to absurd adventure...  Knowing that the buses - well, all forms of transportation, really - are very crowded, rather than attempt to bring my new purchase on a bus going back to Copceac I decided to ride it 52km back from Ceadir-Lunga.

I came dressed for a workout and packed plenty of water, a lunch, and some snacks.  During the 1.5 hour bus ride to Ceadir-Lunga that morning I drew a rough map of the route so I wouldn't get lost.  [It's a pretty simple map because there's rarely more than two (poorly) paved roads, so most of the directions consist of "go straight" or "pass the fields on both your left and right."]

I stopped along the way to snap a few pics, though most of what I saw were people working the fields by hand.  I also stopped several times along the way to roll up a spare shirt and stuff it under my butt when I realized that the seat wasn't nearly as comfortable as I thought it was when I bought the bike...

Anyway, the whole trip (including 45 minutes for lunch, a 30 minute detour to get a print out of my last telephone bill, and ultimately being overpowered by gravity on a gigantic hill toward the very end of the trip which forced me to walk the bike) took about 4 hours.  Not too shabby.

I rewarded myself with a haircut when I got home - something I probably should have preemptively given myself before the trip to cut down on drag and increase heat dissipation.  I stretched, ate, showered, and had no trouble falling asleep that night.  All in all, a good adventure and one I see absolutely no need to ever repeat.