Saturday 6 September 2014

Das Fahrrad (or Le Velo II)

I'm not the only one between jobs ;-0
I have been trying to get a charger for my bike for 3 weeks now.  First I hoped that Air Transat would just return to me the one that is in the bag that's sitting in the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport lost luggage room. No such luck.

Then I tried buying a replacement charger, first in North Vancouver, then in Germany. After 5 7am transatlantic phone calls this endeavour has not progressed beyond its initial stages.

While all this is going on, the weather here is just gorgeous.  Cloudless skies and 24 degrees. And I don't have a workingh e-bike to go out there !!! 

Well, actually, I do have a working e-bike ;-)  The knowledge that Evolution Bikes in North Vancouver had a German Haibike (~ Shark bike in English) sitting on their showroom floor kept eating away at my subconscious.  Every time the charger-buying endeavour hit another snag, I opened my computer and stared at the Haibike.



Then, on Saturday morning it all came together:  1)  I finished another translation.  2)  The owner of Evolution bikes is usually only in the store on Saturdays.  3)  The ferry about to leave in one hour was only 30 % full.  4)  A cheque compensating me for some of my avalanche translation work had arrived.  5) The weather forecast remained fabulous.  6) My gut feeling told me to go.




Even when I hopped in my car, I wasn't yet entirely sure whether I would go for Chinese food in Gibsons or actually take the ferry. After all, I only came to the Sunshine Coast yesterday.  But to the ferry terminal I drove, boarded the ferry, and 20 minutes after disembarking in Horseshoe Bay, I opened the Evolution Bikes store door.   The test drive took 10 minutes.  That's all it took to know ;-)

Nice ride ;-)
Let's hope that this bike has less susceptibility to failures and break-downs than Le Velo.  Oh, and don't worry about Le Velo. As soon as someone is finally willing to sell me a charger, it will see lots of riding. But maybe it will be residing somewhere in Europe, so that airlines won't be able to lose any more saddle bags. We'll see.

The ferry ride just completed an otherwise perfect day: one of those magical rides into the setting sun. All that was missing was someone humming a mystical tune, as I longingly remember from a last-ferry ride last year.





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