Day 2: Stuck in Calgary

My first night in Canada wasn’t great. It is hard to tell your head to not overthink especially when you have nothing to distract you from it but waiting. Oh, and patience and passivity are not exactly my strengths.

Around 4:30 am I gave up pretending to sleep.

The funeral service for Resi would be taking place on the coming weekend. Since Carolins daughter Tabea will be leaving for New Zealand for a year next Monday that made perfect sense. However, there was no way that I would make it home in time given that the next airport was in Winnipeg around 900km away from Saskatoon. If I should ever make it there.

Since Rosinante was equipped with an AirTag, I was able to locate her pretty much everywhere in the. world when there are other smartphones around. The app showed that Rosinante was still in Frankfurt, 7,559km away from me. That was bad news because the flight she was supposed to be on was across Iceland already! F****ck!

After a round of cursing, I called Air Canada but did not get through. I checked the delayed baggage website and found a record of my case but no resolution.

Probably the following flights were all fully booked and there was simply no free space left for a big bike box. Yesterday however, I was pretty sure that my bike was in Terminal 1. Today, I could see it moving around in Terminal 2. What did she do in T2? Was that a good sign? Was the technology working right?

So, I extended my trucker motel by a night. And I would also need to extend my rental car.

I was going over my options:

• Wait another day and potentially another one
• Drive to the Airport and escalate the case
• Buy a new bicycle
• Fly back home

None of the them sounded particularly attractive to me. The biggest problems were that I neither had visibility on when the problem was going to be resolved nor did I feel in control of the resolution. So in other terms, this was a little crisis.

How good that I have written a couple of books on overcoming crisis 🥸.

One of the most important strategies in dealing with crisis is to accept it, talk about it and reach out for help.

After breakfast I started researching bike shops to explore the options of buying a new bike. Already at the second shop (bow cycles – highly recommend) they had one bike in stock which would fit. It was a Kona Rove and it resembled Rosinante to the dot.

I asked Lance, the great sales guy, to reserve the bike until next day. In my mind I had already started writing lists of gear that I would need including yet another new tent.

Of course I had already checked that MEC, Canada’s best outdoor chain, did have tents on stock.

My wife Carolin,who knows me as good as nobody else, suggested in her unique way to not choose action but to choose trust and faith instead. To listen to the silent voice inside of me that always knew the answer. I would like to confess that those are not my strong-suits.

Next I took a quick rest at the motel and then drove to the airport to talk to the “delayed luggage” guys. Even though Rosinantes AirTag suggested that she was still in Frankfurt the gentleman told me that she had just landed and still had to clear customs.

That sounded to good to be true. And so it was. After three hours of waiting the information turned out to be incorrect. Again, my bike was not on board that airplane.

Back to square one. Meanwhile, I had made the acquaintance of Jamie and Mo, the two gentlemen who opened my case yesterday. I had told them about my fundraising project and showed them some evidence for it. They had asked me into their office “behind the scenes” and were really making an effort to help me.

Together, we have developed the following plan: if tomorrow around the checkin time in Frankfurt Rosinantes AirTag shows movement then we will assume she is being loaded onto the aircraft and I will again wait a day for the arrival of the plane. If there should be no movement I will go ahead and buy the new bike and Rosinante will hopefully be shipped to my home address.

We will have to see who will pay for all that in the end.