The Daughter of the Engineer comes through…

 

July 9, 2008

Rachel’s always thinking. What to do? What to do? She decides she’d prefer to not be widowed in Italy and comes up with a plan…to get a bike for me that actually has brakes. Since we noticed that most of the bikes in the kiosks have “disappeared” or have been stripped down, we feel almost no guilt with Rachel’s plan to find one of the few somewhere in the city and swap it out with my loser of a bike.

The day before, Rachel had gotten all excited when she found a bike in a park near the train station, tested its brakes while still on the rack, and pronounced us good to go. I hated to have to burst her bubble but I had to… since it would be my butt on the nonexistent seat! Disappointed but undeterred, we returned home to regroup and check the map for more kiosks. We then realized we had missed a kiosk in the same park with the seatless bike.

The next day (because we don’t want to exercise too much in one day) we head there and score! There is one bike in the rack and it has both a seat and, so far so good, brakes that work. These beggars are now getting choosy: we decide we like the basket on the loser bike and Rachel says why don’t we take BOTH bikes back home and swap out the good parts from the loser to the “good” bike. After a few minutes of debate over the ethics of the situation, we decide to do it anyway. Partners in crime, we head home.

Where did she get these tools, I wanted to know, now worried that bike swapping wasn’t her only crime in Italy. But apparently, ever resourceful, Rachel had brought them from Seattle and supplemented what she didn’t have with tools from our (Italian) kitchen junk drawer. (It’s good to know that junk drawers are universal, isn’t it?) And fifteen minutes later… Voila, a lean, mean riding machine reborn! My hero always.

Okay, so that leaves us still with the loser, my new stallion, and her windshield/basket donkey waiting for us (we hoped) in the original kiosk. As we approach our earlier mecca I remind Rachel that each bike has a number on it that corresponds with a number on the rack and so how were we going to leave Bike # 365 in Bike # 255’s spot? We had speculated prior to our outing that since most of the bikes had been ripped off perhaps the rack wasn’t that sophisticated in design. Well the test came… and the design won. Our keys didn’t work. We of course said (with a chorus of Italians in agreement), but this is Italy! We should have known that they’d get it half right!!

Postscript…the two criminals leave the loser, breakless bike and make it look like it’s locked in the slot even though it isn’t, and the numbers don’t match. (Like anyone ever looks!) I ride the stallion to the donkey’s crib and pretend to lock it to the loser’s old number but really just lock it to itself. We decide to go home and take a nap as crime sprees can be exhausting. We’ll ride our new bikes another day.