Portrait of an LBX

By Andy

In two and a half hours or so, if all goes well, I’ll be on a bus from Shanghai to Quzhou (衢州) to meet up with Evan and Alexis again and find a farmer who built his own airplane, MacGuyver style. I feel like I’ve been pushing this day back continuously for about two weeks now, but hopefully the extra time will be good for my knee. As of two days ago I was planning on leaving yesterday, but then equipment failures and mountains kept Evan and Alexis from getting as far as they needed to, and we pushed the meet-up back to today. Then I made a poor decision to order enough Chicken Vindaloo for dinner last night and breakfast this morning, and ended up holed up in the bathroom instead of getting on the 9 a.m. bus to Quzhou. So now I’ll be taking the noon bus.

The upside of this downtime (ha) has been that I’ve had plenty of time to read and learn some more Chinese. I’ve also been putting enough coffee in my system to last for the rest of the trip in case we never see another Starbucks again, and there were some excellent, single malt Scotch whiskies that my friends Cathy and Pete brought into town as well. In the past week and a half I’ve also had the opportunity to do some translation work and make some good money, so my injury and extended time in Shanghai shouldn’t leave me in too much of a financial hole, even if the insurance company decides not to reimburse me. But they had better.

I’ve also decided to drop 10 pounds or so of equipment as well in order to give my knees the easiest time possible. Stuff left behind includes: a near-empty gas canister for the stove, my Kryptonite u-lock and cable, our solar panels and related wiring/adapters, one of my external camera flashes, a book, a deck of playing cards, the harmonica my coworker Flora bought for me before I left Beijing (I feel bad about leaving this), a couple of our numerous spare inner tubes and four boxes of US-China Friendship Bicycling Team business cards. I’ve also added some things: insulated, waterproof booties to go over my cycling shoes, a pair of spandex, waterproof gloves, a sturdy knee brace, a knee band, four tubes of anti-inflammatory ointment, and a two-week supply of supposedly cartilage-regenerating pills. Hopefully that will all pay off by way of healthier knees.

So, with any luck, our Flickr stream will no longer be filled with so many blurry shots of people going by on scooters and bikes in Shanghai, and the rest of this year will work out as it’s supposed to! Wish me luck.

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UPDATE: As fate would have it, as soon as I hit the “publish” button on this post, Evan called me to tell me that he and Alexis are sick after camping out in the freezing cold and will not be making it to our meet-up point in Quzhou today. So, I will be in Shanghai for one more day. That’s it, I swear.