August 20, 2025
Day 2: Vancouver Airport to Frankfurt
This air hop did not feature any of the more exciting glitches that we know are possible. But it did have a few annoyances. The first was that the audio jack at my seat was broken. That opened the prospect of 10 hours in the seat with only my own thoughts to amuse me, and no movies to watch and listen to. They probably would have had to carry me out raving after ten hours of talking to myself. Fortunately I got the jack working, though it kept falling out. But next Dodie's screen went completely black. The flight attendants totally ignored the call button for that one, though we did manage to buttonhole one. The call light stayed on for the duration of the flight, ignored throughout.
The food service was the next annoyance. The main meal was just so so pasta, but for breakfast some genius invented a donut filled with an egg. It was really gross. Recently I watched a UK food reviewer sampling a burger at UK Tim Horton's, which used a donut for the bun. Perhaps it is an evil trend. almost wholly inedible.
At Frankfurt, instead of making an insane push to reach Leipzig by getting on a train straightaway, we booked into the airport Marriott. It was really costly, but we were really beat. And besides, we had a very special other plan for Frankfurt.
For fifteen of more years we have been following the cycling adventures of Ken and Tricia Graham. Many others have actually met them, but never us. But as it happens, they blew into Frankfurt yesterday! Their plan is to rent bikes here and to cycle to the Rhine and up the Mosel, at least. They took a hotel room near the bike rental, and we were going to search them out there. But they astutely guessed that we would be exhausted, so they came out to the Marriott.
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The other thing I wanted to mention is a little embarrassing. I think, possibly, I might have communicated with Tricia long ago. Well, ten years isn't that long ago, but only now did her name ring a bell with me. If she is the person I'm thinking of, she was active on "Bicycle Life." I think I remember she lived in Italy and had an olive grove at the time. Or maybe it was a vineyard. Or maybe both. And she had some kind of connection with France too. If none of that is true, I'm even more embarrassed. It would be super-embarrassing to write all this stuff on her journal.
If Trisha is reading this--I'll leave it up to her to confirm or deny my iffy remembrance.
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Of course, as in all Cycleblaze meetups, hours of comparing notes and plans ensued. But there was something else. From her self descriptions, I had imagined Tricia as a now fairly frail and possibly doddery little old lady. Not a bit of it! What we found was a quite tall and vigorous woman, sharp witted, and not even as slow on her two canes as one might guess. And Ken, by virtue of not being the blogger, had seemed distant and not so into the cycling adventures. Wrong again! Ken may not happen to be the blog writer, but he is just as vigorous and well spoken as Tricia. It was easy to understand how this couple had cycled, and before that, walked, such distances!
I took the liberty of admitting that I was having to revise my expectations of who they were. They absorbed the comment with little reaction, so I can also add modesty to their list of attributes.
Back home, Sandra had suggested a Tricia/Dodie race on the canes. It didn't quite happen, which is good. I am not sure where the smart money would have gone on that one!
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After just a few hours, Tricia and Ken seemed to suddenly arise. They took one quick snapshot of us, and charged off on their way. There is a vague chance we will run into them again on the Rhine, but it was sure a great and historic meeting!
The "Kiss and Cry" excerpt from the video.
They are off! We'll try to catch them on the Rhine.
Breakfast here at the Marriott is $Can57 per person, so they can forget that. Fortunately there are plenty of little sandwich shops out in the concourse. I took a photo of one, and commented to the attendant that the shop was a tourist attraction for me. She understood, observing that I was now in the bread capital of the world. Hooray!
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5 months ago
Time to collapse into bed. We have been up for over 24 hours!
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