The Bike is Important

I don’t think you understand how important this is. This is not a toy or for going to the shops. This is for tens of thousands of miles of dirt roads, jungles, deserts and mountains. This is my home for years. For the majority of people I meet for the next few years, this is all they will remember of me. You did this like you had no time for better, then spent the rest of the day standing around doing nothing.

This morning I started to cry. I put on Runrig, “Road and the River”, which triggered it, although I almost felt like crying when I saw your work yesterday. I should have insisted you do it better. I didn’t negotiate the price down because I wanted you to be interested enough in it to do a good job. Apparently that didn’t work. The only reason I let you continue and paid you is because I couldn’t move without it. Something that might last a few hundred miles would at least let me escape this place now. The one thing that was good about this work was that it was done by 3pm the day it started.

Now I am sitting right next to a freedom machine but still feel trapped. I don’t know if I can cycle because of illness. If I do I’ll probably get wet when my tent leaks again. If I want better gear I will need to wait for it to be delivered here - I think there is no chance of buying something that is not rubbish here. That means waiting somewhere - again I am trapped. All the time I can’t even eat anything that is not poison, so it’s not surprising I have been ill for nearly two weeks. The current cold that is, not diarrhoea and vomiting immediately preceding. And it will probably take days to choose things and order them on the internet, and most of the days will be wasted trying to find working wifi.

I am thinking too much. I can get out of an hotel room in the morning without thinking - I have done this before. I am going to cycle, kit be dammed. I am going to ride my bike today whether I have a map and a waterproof tent or not.

Now I feel better. I’m going to have breakfast.