Last week, my car started getting through antifreeze faster than it was getting through gas; I’d fill up the radiator and before I’d gone a couple of miles the Radiator light was on and I’d left a trail of blue liquid all up and down the road. This being Texas, there’s ample opportunity to overheat, so I thought I’d better get it seen to. I’m a one (crappy) car family, and the nearest Chevrolet service center is some 5 miles away, so I figured I’d strap my bike to the back of the car and drive it round on Monday morning, then cycle back, and work from home for the day.
Great plan, until I called up at around 4 pm to find out how they were getting on, and they said they hadn’t even looked at my car yet (despite me scheduling an 8:00 am appointment via their website), and would be holding onto it until the next day, when they ‘hoped’ to get time to look at it. At which point I realized how very difficult it is to live here without a car. I needed to pick my eldest from school at 5, as he’s currently on crutches (else he’d be cycling), which I couldn’t do on my bike, so I had to ask around and eventually borrow a car of a friend (thanks, Bob!). I also couldn’t get my youngest to taekwondo, so he missed that. I’d also not been able to run to the store over the weekend (as I didn’t want to use the car more than I had to), and the nearest supermarket is 3 miles away, so we had no food in the house, and were resigned to eating what we could find in the freezer.
The next problem was that I still didn’t have a car to drive to work on Tuesday. I did think I’d just work from home again, but then my new boss called a face-to-face meeting, so I had to go in. With a decision that would make my old buddy Charles Ross proud, I decided that I’d go the eco-warrior route and just cycle to work (although Charles would no doubt sneer at me because my bike wasn’t made of bamboo, and my backpack wasn’t made of recycled tampons or something…). I’d done this before, and it’s only 10 miles, so I figured it would be a piece of cake. Plus, it would give me the opportunity to put Endomondo (which I’ve just installed on my BlackBerry Z10) to work – I was skeptical that the GPS tracking would be accurate (I had it in an arm-band case).
As it turns out, Endomondo tracked my route perfectly – and even showed me a scalable map at the end so that I could see where I was taking the long route and make any adjustments (although the only way I could have shortened my route would have been to cycle across a couple of fields and/or cycled along Interstate 10…). It also barked out my progress at me through my headphones (interrupting my music to do so) every mile, which I thought was pretty good – although to make it really effective they need to add some ‘motivational’ phrases, like “Whoa, you dropped your pace a bit there…better start picking it up, pussy!”, and “You call that cycling?? My grandma could do better!”. As it was, I thought I was doing pretty well. At least until I was passed by a guy in a wheelchair. Hearing a “To your left!” barked out I glanced over my shoulder to see what I first thought was a recumbent (now those guys piss me off – acting all smug just because they’re lying down and cycling at the same time…), but turned out to be a guy on one of those ‘sport’ wheelchairs, with his empty trouser-legs flapping in his slipstream. Damn showoff. I could have beaten him if I’d had a racing bike (and not a mountain bike with fat, full-traction tires on it). Plus all of Lance Armstrong’s drugs… And I had to carry my work laptop in my backpack, which Douglas Bader in the wheelchair didn’t. And this is not a Macbook Air, but a decrepit old Dell PC that must’ve weighed 20lbs – I may as well have been carrying an Osborne 1 on my back…
Anyway, I made it in, more or less in one piece. And then spent the day trying to massage some life back into my thighs, and stressing over the thought of my impending cycle home. Which, as the garage had then called me to say my car was ready, would be a 15 mile journey back – the garage being in the opposite direction from my house to work. Maybe it was the adjustments I’d made to my bike for the home journey – angling my razor-thin saddle slightly to the right to cater for my dressing to the left- but according to Endomondo I actually managed a faster ‘lap time’ on the way back, clocking in at what I consider to be a respectable 4’02” per mile (not quite Triathlon speed, Vicki, but I’m trying…).
Interestingly, Endomondo also told me that my lowest altitude was 36.089237 ft above sea level and my highest was 111.54855 ft, so that’s a 75.459313 ft hill I cycled up at some point. I thought I seemed to be cycling uphill a lot of the way! (Both there and back, somehow…) That said, I do think that measuring the height to six decimal places seems a tad unnecessary – that’s like, what, a couple of microns? I could have stood up on my pedals and seriously skewed that measurement…
So, much as cycling was significantly less unpleasant than I thought it would be, and although I felt all smug at having burned 1095 calories (which I then ruined by driving to Ci-Ci’s all-you-can-eat pizza buffet for dinner), I was certainly glad to be able to slip behind the wheel of my car and join the real world again. It may have cost me $952.07 to get it fixed, but it was worth every cent. People mock Americans’ love of their cars and their sheer unwillingness to do without them, but in reality they are an absolute necessity, and I wouldn’t want to be without one again – even if it was only for 36 hours.
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