On Arriving

By Penina

Whenever I told people about the trip, they almost always asked me the same question: “How will you get your bikes to Portugal?”

After six hours spent setting them up in the airport, the answer is “with great aggravation.”

I’m deeply appreciative of Jeremy, who took on the lion’s share of disassembling and re-packing the bikes in the cardboard bike boxes that we checked at the airport. I’ve taken apart and packed my bike before, and it goes much easier with two sets of hands and two people keeping track of the gazillion tiny screws.

But it is still hard to keep every bit and piece organized. There was a moment when this almost resulted in total catastrophe. Our flight was six hours overnight, so we landed at 10 am Lisbon time with only an hour or two of sleep under our belts. We were hungry, exhausted, and eager to get out of the airport and into the city. I was fitting my wheel onto my fork when I casually asked Jeremy where the axels were.

He looked at me for a moment. “It’s not in the box?”

“Nope.”

He looked at me for another moment, eyes widening.

“I think I left them in Boston.”

He started picking through our bike boxes frantically.

“Yup. I think they’re on the floor of our bike room in Boston.”

Every fiber of my being wanted to toss him out a window. How could he have left something so important? I was envisioning dragging our wheelless bikes on Lisbon busses, trying to reach a bike shop, waiting in town for a week if we had to order in new parts online…

But then I remembered what had happened about a year ago, last June. We were in an Uber on our way to a bus stop in Boston. The bus was heading nonstop to New York, where we were catching a flight to Greece. In the Uber, Jeremy asked me if I had both our passports. I said yes, and pulled them out to show him.

When we got to the bus stop, the bus was about to leave, and we sprinted out with our things and barely had time to sit down before it took off.

A few minutes later, I got a message from our Uber driver, saying we’d left something in the Uber and that we should call her.

“What did we leave,” I asked, with a sinking feeling of dread.

“Your passports.”

We begged the Uber driver to drive them to the airport so we could ship them overnight to a friend’s apartment in New York. I was panicking, full of guilt I wanted to jump off the bus, bury my head in the dirt, and scream. But then Jeremy took my hand.

“Hey, it’s ok. It could have happened to anybody. And now that this has happened to you once, you know it’ll never happen again.”

He was nothing but loving, patient, and kind to me, when if the roles had been reversed I would have been pissed. So when he thought he had left the bike axles in Boston, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that these things can happen to anybody, and that aggravation would only make the situation worse for both of us.

And while I don’t think I believe in the power of “positive thoughts,” I do think that, in some mysterious and roundabout way, that mentality was to thank when we found the axles ten minutes later, in our carry-on luggage.