A background in physics or structural engineering would have helped ease my mind or at least keep me from checking my rear view mirror every 20 seconds during my weekend 12-hour road trip. I was waiting to watch my bike frame fly off the roof of my car and cartwheel down the highway, causing a tractor-trailer to jack-knife and wipe out 10 other vehicles speeding down the freeway outside Chicago. I thought for sure the road vibrations and the wind would team up to slowly but methodically unscrew the wing nuts on the fork-like Thule thingy that was holding my front wheel on my roof rack. For the entire trip, I went back and forth with a mental debate: If my Campy Zonda wheel went bouncing down the highway, would I bother to stop to salvage a rim that would most definitely be battered beyond repair? (I decided I would because it would make a great photo for the Web site.)
For a literary brain wired more for drama than science, it was hard to believe that a bike would really stay attached to a car that spends 12 hours barreling down highways, buffeted by Midwestern winds gusting off fields full of corn and soybeans. It just seemed too simple, fastening a bike to a car roof with only two contact points: the fork locked into a frame with quick-release hardware and a rear wheel held down on a rail with a ratchet strap. (I’m giving the Thule Domestique rack high marks) Each time we stopped for gas or the calls of nature, I’d get out of the car with a knot in my stomach, thinking I’d look up at the roof and my beloved Moots wouldn’t be there. To my amazement, all was well and the journey was safe and uneventful. Blessed by the road gods again.
Hundreds of other travelers who survived the 12-hour flight from Tokyo to New York stood with me at the baggage carousel at JFK Airport. As a stream of suitcases slowly moved past us, I quietly chanted to myself, “Oh please oh please, don’t be last.” I was thinking about my Campy Zonda wheels. I asked the movers to box them up so that I could carry them with my other luggage as we left Asia to move back to the U.S. Weeks before the trip, my wife banned me from bringing a bike box. I’m not whipped. I don’t always listen to my wife. But after years of marriage, I have a good sense of when she’s really serious and it’s time to compromise for the sake of the relationship’s future.
So I didn’t bring my bike packed in a box. But she never said anything about not bringing a pair of wheels! Or stashing a Campy Record gruppo with seatpost, saddle and pedals in my duffel bag so that I could build up a new bike on the other end of our journey! That’s what I did and she wasn’t happy about it, but she couldn’t complain much. Instead, she would occasionally glare at me or mutter under her breath, “Those damn (fill in a bike part).” So there we were at the airport, watching the bags go by. Watching the crowd of passengers thin out as people hauled their luggage away. After an hour, it was just us and a guy waiting for what appeared to be a huge tuba-type musical instrument. We had all of our bags – five of them – except for the box of wheels. I could feel my wife standing at my side, inflicting a severe case of frost bite on one side of my body with her icy stare. I went with the tuba guy to see if the baggage staff could locate my wheels. We waited for five minutes before we saw a guy wheeling a cart from the far end of the room with my wheels and the massive black instrument case. “Hey great, now we’ve got everything! Let’s go!” I said with a cheerful voice. My wife just hissed at me.
The movers did a good job packing the wheels. They custom built a thick cardboard box. After they put the wheels in the box, they filled up the empty space with folded pieces of cardboard and heavy packing paper. The only problem was that the cardboard was too thin. My trip began with a three-hour flight to Seoul, where I met my wife and kids. When I picked up my wheels, I noticed the end of the hubs had already poked a hole in the box. During my three-day stopover in Seoul, I patched up the box with duct tape and cardboard that I scavenged off the streets. It held up well but one of the hubs bore another hole through a patch by the time I reached our final destination – my parents’ home in Kansas City.
The tense moments continued with my wife during the rest of the trip. The hapless wheel box was always the extra cargo that complicated things. It always seemed to be the last piece of luggage the taxi driver or bellhop needed to handle. “Oh man, where are we going to put this?” said one cab driver as he tried to stuff our small mountain of luggage into his mini van. To get the wheels to fit, he needed to remove a suitcase and put it in the vehicle’s passenger seat – severely reducing my wife’s leg room. I had one of those moments when I reflected on the insanity of my cycling addiction. Has it come to the point when my most important relationships are suffering? Has it seriously skewed my priorities? But then I looked at things from a different angle. I thought about how lucky I was to have a wife who has really short legs!
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