Miles From Nowhere by Barbara Savage

Author:Barbara Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mountaineers Books

13

BROKEN FRAME

FROM LONDON IT TOOK US fifteen days to reach the Alps at the German-Austrian border. In those two weeks, we had two near disasters.

The day we rode into Paris, we had roared over one hundred miles of rolling hills. The final forty miles we covered at a steady, nonstop pace of seventeen miles an hour. Once we reached the city limits, we bounced and rattled over ten miles of brick streets to the city campground in the Bois de Boulogne. It was nine o’clock when we stumbled into the campground, and every inch of our bodies ached.

Before we fell asleep I mentioned the wobble again. I couldn’t see Larry’s face, but I knew he was rolling his eyes in disgust. He rolled them whenever I talked about the mysterious wobble and its grinding noise. For almost a month now I’d felt something peculiar in the way my bike was handling. The front end seemed to vibrate all the time, and it made a strange grinding sound. Every day I commented on the wobble, and every day Larry told me it was all in my head. His reaction never varied.

“Look,” he’d grumble, “you’re either imagining the wobble or you’re causing it by the way you steer and pump your pedals. There’s nothing wrong with your bike frame. We’ve checked it out. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your front forks. Ignore it.”

But I was convinced there was a problem with my frame and frustrated that I could never find its source. Today the unsteadiness had made me especially nervous, particularly while I was pounding down the hills at forty miles an hour.

“You know,” I said softly after we’d been in bed only a few minutes. “I felt the wobble again today and I think it’s getting worse.”

Larry faked a few long, grumbling snores and I took the hint and dropped the subject.

In the morning, we hopped on our bikes, minus our gear, and cycled into downtown Paris to do some sightseeing. It didn’t take us long to discover that in Paris, the finish point for the Tour de France, a bicycler is God. Seated on a sleek racing frame and clad in a multicolored cycling jersey, a racer can shoot through stop signs and red lights, and motorists and pedestrians will carefully and graciously make room. Larry and I, dressed in our faded shorts and T-shirts, most certainly did not look like racers, but we were on bicycles, and that proved to be good enough. Everyone gave us the right-of-way, even at the celebrated Arc de Triomphe, where an incredible twelve lanes of traffic fed into and out of one roundabout, with cars shooting every which way like sprays of fireworks.

We managed to survive the roundabout, but just after we shot out of it and turned down a wide brick boulevard, my bike swerved to the left and I nearly collided with the car next to me. I jerked my handlebars to the right, but the bike failed to respond. It moved straight ahead.

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