Sunday, August 20, 2006
Summary Part 1: Hobo Roadtrip '06
We're back! We got in at around 10 last night, and are heading back to toronto on the 5pm train this afternoon....yesterday was a bit stressful - we had to drop Laura's bike off in Montreal so that it could be shipped on the train to toronto. Why? Via has checked luggage on the montreal/toronto route, but not the ottawa/toronto route, so you can't bring bikes between ottawa/toronto, but you CAN between montreal/toronto. PLUS it's only about $22.
The thing about shipping a bike though is that they put it in a box - meaning you need to take off your pedals, and turn your handlebars. I know enough about bikes to know that turning handlebars is relatively easy and requires an alan key, and that taking off pedals is more difficult, and requires a narrow wrench.
We arrive in Montreal, wrenchless.
Laura lived there for a term, so knows the city better than I do(read: not at all)...but the only hardware store she knew was closed on saturdays. We ultimately started looking up bike stores in the phone book, and eventually found somewhere we could buy a wrench.
We still had to actually get the pedals off, which ended up being quite a feat - i guess you're supposed to get a LONG wrench with lots of leverage, but we got this tinsy tiny little mini-wrench. So I'm in front of the train station literally like JUMPING on the wrench. We finally got them pedals off, and the ol' bike is now en route to toronto.
THERE WAS AN OPEN BRACKET INSTEAD OF A CLOSED BRACKET!!!
More later.
The thing about shipping a bike though is that they put it in a box - meaning you need to take off your pedals, and turn your handlebars. I know enough about bikes to know that turning handlebars is relatively easy and requires an alan key, and that taking off pedals is more difficult, and requires a narrow wrench.
We arrive in Montreal, wrenchless.
Laura lived there for a term, so knows the city better than I do(read: not at all)...but the only hardware store she knew was closed on saturdays. We ultimately started looking up bike stores in the phone book, and eventually found somewhere we could buy a wrench.
We still had to actually get the pedals off, which ended up being quite a feat - i guess you're supposed to get a LONG wrench with lots of leverage, but we got this tinsy tiny little mini-wrench. So I'm in front of the train station literally like JUMPING on the wrench. We finally got them pedals off, and the ol' bike is now en route to toronto.
THERE WAS AN OPEN BRACKET INSTEAD OF A CLOSED BRACKET!!!
More later.
# posted by Greg @ 6:09 AM 
