A gift from a dear friend

a gift of biker survival items

While I was gone on the recent long bike trip, a friend from the Netherlands sent me a couple of packages. She had been shopping for hiking shoes for an upcoming trip to Italy, saw these items and "thought" of me.

Although I only knew Heidi for three years in the Netherlands, we bonded like sisters and continue to keep our eyes and fingers in each others lives, even from a distance. Heidi is an expat child of a interantional marriage and has lived in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe for most of her adult life. She is an incredibly talented quilter, with a natural eye for design and color that most people would envy, and a spinner as well, which is how I first met her. She has a sanity and sense of humor about life and the experiences of living as an ex pat, raising a teenage daughter and retaining her sanity through various physical problems that endear her even further to me. She is the only person, outside my family, that I would ever trust with life and death decisions concerning me or mine.

So she sent me this lovely set of biker survival items including an orange tube of fabric, two books , a red tube of fabric identical to the orange in size and shape, a package of two bike lights,and a small wooden shoe pincushion from her local quilting shop.

The tubes of fabric, made of polyester microlite, are designed to be a multi functional garment. By turning, folding and twisting, each can be made into a cap, hairband, scarf, sweatband, balaclave, pirate scarf, and scrunchy. Each folds down to the size of a small deck of cards, and is extremely thin and light weight. I think I may have discovered another use for this item when I was out on a training ride in the heat, humidity and headwinds the other day. I soaked it in water and wore it loosely around my neck as a scarf. The evaporation definitely helped. Perhaps next time I will soak it and wear it up under my helmet so that the air streaming through the vents can cool my head.

The second tube has an amusing sheep cartoon on it (thus the carboard model of the sheep wearing it in the photo. The graphic makes it applicable not only for biking,but for stylish wear at the next spin gathering. It also reminds me a free screen saver called "e-sheep" that I used to have on my computer. The graphics for this program showed a cartoon like sheep wandering around on the screen, grazing, rolling in the flowers and getting abducted by aliens and re-entering as a fireball. Periodically the sheep would sit and just stare out of the screen blinking and chewing. I found it amusing, even if no one else did.

Also included were two very bright clip on bike lights each with several systems of blinking and solid lights for increased visibility.

During the recent ride I went through three mirrors, one of which broke when the bike fell over, the other two of which committed suicide by leaping off of the bike on steep fast downhills. I also went through two watches, both of which drowned in various foul weather incidents. The 2 lost lights I can't explain, except to say that they were always clipped to the back of the bike bag and obviously leapt or were pushed off by some combination of rough road surface, bad weather and mysterious circumstances. Maybe they ran away home or decided to take up residency elsewhere. Thanks to Heidi, this problem is solved, at least for the moment.

The two books are amusing reading. The first ( I always get my sin) is about Dutch speakers who translate standard Dutch phrases and idioms directly into American English and use them as translations. You have to have lived in the Netherlands and speak a bit of Dutch to understand the humor, but it is a good read, gently poking in fun at both of the cultures and their language obscurities. At the end of the book is a 12 page poem about English (both American and British) words which are not pronounced as they are spelled. Think of threw and through and you get the idea.

The second "I'm A Stranger here myself" by Bill Bryson is commentary about returning to the US after living abroad for 20 years. Again, I guess you have to have lived a long time outside of the US to truly appreciate the humor in the situations and incidents he comments on. I will say however, that a lot of his comments seem particularly pertinent to me right now as I try to re-enter a more generalized and less bike specific life in Texas. Many of these would probably not be as pertinent if I were returning to some other state.

As for the wooden shoe, one can never have too many wooden shoe souvenirs.

NB anyone interested in more information on the tube items should check out the website http://www.profeet.de/ and look under H.A.D. Lady. Unfortunately the text is all in German.
Also http://www.buff.es/ which has distribution in the US as well as other countries and so is in English and has a list of stores in the US by state and zipcode. I particularly like the running of the bulls graphic as well as the sheep being abducted by aliens.