Prelude: The Bike
In
June, 2000 we went on a tour with a company called TandemTours
that included riding in Yellowstone National Park and around Jackson,
Wyoming.
We bought our new
Bilenky tandem specifically for this tour, since I wanted
the ease of travelling with an S&S coupled bike. Before
we ever left on the vacation, I learned the first rule of dealing
with Bilenky Cycle Works... don't depend on delivery by any promised
delivery date. The corollaries to this rule are: e-mail
may or not be answered, phone messages probably won't be returned,
and lines will get crossed.
As you can see, the paint job was
custom and complicated. We probably would have had the bike
just a little after the promised April 1st delivery date if it
hadn't been for the complications with the paint. The design
on the bike involved 6 separate PPG paints... pearl over white,
grandeur blue metallic over pace car blue metallic, and romanesque
crimson metallic over fine gold metallic. The stars
were done by first painting the whole area white, then pearl coating
it, then masking the star shapes with tape, then painting the
pace car blue, then painting the grandeur blue. This was
the easy part. The joints between the blue, white, and red
areas also had to be masked as each section was done to give a
clean, straight line between them. So after the painter
had finished all of this, all that was left to do was clear coat
the frame. This is when it started getting messy!
As best as I understand it, PPG
(the paint company) had recently changed the way their paints
were handled. On the old system, a hardener was applied
before clear coating. On the new system, no hardener was
needed. Oh... unless you have taped joint, that is. The
painter didn't know this and didn't use a hardener. As a
result, all of those nice clean joints between the colors melted
into each other when he clear coated the bike. So he had
to start from scratch after sandblasting the bike down to bare
metal. I'm glad I wasn't there to hear what he thought about
having to do that. The end result was that the bike
was beautiful, but it took about 7 weeks extra to finish paining
it.
So finally, May 28th, we took delivery
of the bike. It was almost ready for prime time. Despite
the fact that we had ordered the bike at the end of December 1999,
there were still parts missing for final assembly. The box
that was supposed to have a pair of brake levers only had one.
We ended up with the correct lever for the (more important)
front brake, and a make-shift older lever for the rear brake.
As a result the rear brake was mushy and very weak. We
hadn't specified 'dummy levers' for the stoker's handlebars, an
oversight on my part. The captain's saddle (a late addition
to the order) was not in yet. The stoker's suspension seat
post (ordered months earlier) was on back order from the manufacturer.
The one pair of pedals we ordered with the bike (also a
late addition) were not in yet. The kickstand also hadn't
come in.
In addition to the parts missing, the
size of the bike didn't seem right. As captain I had almost
NO standover clearance on the bike. While straddling the
top tube I could lift the front wheel about 1/2" off the
ground before the top tube hit me. This wasn't nearly enough.
There wasn't anything we could do about that, and it was
rideable as it was.
Just as we had the bike boxed
up and we were ready to leave for home, Dawn, who had been having
stomach pains all day, told me it was getting unbearable. So
we ended up in a hospital in Philadelphia for the evening while
they ran various tests to make sure she didn't have appendicitis.
While it all turned out ok, it was about 1 am before we
were on the road headed home.
After we got home, I found that
we had left a critical part, the locking ring for the World Class
tri-lock headset, at Bilenky's shop in our rush to get to the
hospital. So Dawn had to make an extra trip up and back
the next day to pick up that one small part. At this
point, after all the delays and frustrations I'd encountered,
I was wishing I had never learned to ride a bicycle.
One our first ride on the bike the
next day, we had a front wheel flat tire (only our second flat
tire in 6 years of tandeming, and the other was on a worn out
tire). After patching the leak, I reinstalled the tire and
pumped it back up. The mini-pump seemed to have trouble
getting past 90 psi, but I kept trying. I later learned
that my new Topeak pump had a defective gauge. I have no
idea what pressure I got up to, but just as we were getting ready
to ride away, the front tire blew off the rim. This
knocked the wheel slightly out of true, shredded the tube, and
damaged the bead of the tire. I installed our one spare
tube and pumped the tire up slowly while watching that the bead
stayed seated. Just as I had decided it was ok, bang! One
more shredded tube. For the first time in 6 seasons
of tandeming, we were unable to finish a ride due to mechanical
failure. The bead of the tire was damaged beyond use, and
we scrambled to find a replacement in time for a ride that weekend.
Everything about this bike was turning into a disaster.
As the June 19th departure date for our
trip neared, I asked to have the dummy levers, right brake lever,
and kickstand sent to us. This was arranged on Monday or Tuesday
of the week before we left. The parts, however, weren't
shipped until Thurday evening. They were sent UPS from Philadelphia
to Maryland, which usually would mean next day delivery. But
of course, something had to go wrong. UPS lost the package. So
the parts spent the weekend in a UPS depot a few miles from my
house where I coudn't get them until Monday. Since we were
leaving for the airport at 4am on Monday, we were out of luck. When
I called Bilenky after the parts didn't arrive Friday, they realized
it might have been better to ship USPS, since they deliver on
Saturday. It was a little late at that point, so we had
one more disappointment with the bike.
Since we really wanted the dummy
levers for the stoker's bars, we arranged to have the parts shipped
out to Wyoming via USPS express mail, where we hoped to catch
up to them at our second overnight stop. We had my sister
pick up the package once it was delivered and ship it out to us.
So we were finally ready to go on vacation. Surely nothing else could go wrong! (ha!)
First,
a word about our plans. We had originally planned to fly
into Jackson, Wyoming on June 19th with the bike and our BOB trailer.
We were going to assemble the bike at the airport, put all
our luggage on the trailer, and ride about 35 miles to our first
overnight stop at Colter Bay Village. We were then
going to ride about 35 miles again on June 20th, to Grant Village
in Yellowstone, where we would stay that night. On June
21st the TandemTours group would be meeting at Grant Village and
we'd be able to turn the luggage and trailer over to them for
the rest of the ride.
Well, all of the adventures with
getting the bike built had shaken my confidence a little. Since
this plan didn't have a lot of margin for error and we hadn't
ever cycled at mountain elevations before, we decided it would
be safer and saner to rent a car for the duration of the trip.
A quick visit to the Priceline web site and we were all
ready to go.