The last day of leaving Estonia was when my two year old Ortlieb paniers broke apart and I had to tape them. I hope to get a refund but WTF they claim to be so reliable…
This is not the first of my technical material to be broken on this biketour, and here we enter the main point of this blogpost: the bike stands. There are two schools of biketourers: One which bikes lay against trees, and the other where, after a fancy backwards move of the cyclist’s leg, the bike stands elegantly in the middle of the field, like a horse over a meadow shining under the sun’s rays. And eventually, it crashes into the ground with no apparent reason.
So, I got this bike from a fellow ecotopian who was leaving in Tallinn, and I wanted this year to be the one where I can stand my bike wherever the fuck I wanted to. And, also needing some other camping stuff, I rode more than 15 km out of the city to the only Decathlon there is in the country. There, I was looking the bike stands suspiciously. Something was not right. The better one they had was just holding one bar of the frame instead of two of them, and it didn’t seem suitable with the more than 40kg my luggage might weigh. But I was already there after almost 20 km so I bought it. I cycled back to Tallinn and eagerly installed it on my new beautiful bike that I will definitely take back home to be my touring bike. BTW, I will call this bike Linda, which means ‘cute’ in Spanish. Anyways, once installed, I loaded the bike with my full luggage, paniers and tent and… it fell to the ground. In that moment, I remembered the words of one of my best friends who worked in the Decathlon bike section for over a year, telling me: „Never buy a stand from Decathlon.“
It didn’t last, and after a few days the stand was already broken. Crapythlon, always there for you. The plastic part that stands on the ground is like rubber when the bikestand is extended, so it’s absolutely usless for heavily loaded touring bikes.
I kept resisting the urge to abandon my dreams of Linda standing on herself. It is good for scouting, for resting a bit next to the road, for dumpster diving… Lesson lerned, I kept the broken stand for a refund in Riga and went to a regular bike shop for a new stand. I found a local franchise called Hawaii Express. The best stand they had was 18.50€ and so called ‘universal’, which meant an extra adjustable joint and an extra weak point. This stand did not fill me with confidence but desperate times call for desperate measures.
It was a pain in the ass since day one. It would readjust itself every few days and was not really compatible with the Teller trailer punk attachment (see the previous blogpost). I had to screw the nuts and install different kinds of rubber from wheel tubes, but it still didn’t really work. One day, Linda fell over and I picked her up to find that this stand from hell bent like vegan butter. After rebending it and taping it, it stood for a day, until it fell again, AND IT BROKE! Shit and fuck! How does metal break?! How does a bike stand that is just basically a metal stick for holding your bike be broken by the weight of a bike??!!! I think humanity went really wrong in some point…
At the end, this has been my solution so far. A good ol’ stick holding under your seat. And it works! Better than any other high tech special cyclist contraption. Now, finally, I can rest in peace, while my bike, Linda, stands majestically over the Lithuanian plains.
