December 8: Epilogue
I was sure my bike got stolen at Santiago airport. An unreasonably helpful person gave me some assistance with the bike, but there were some weird things going on, and after getting to security I had an unpleasant realization that he was sus.
He appeared when I was checking in, acted like he worked there - in hindsight, he almost certainly didn't have the official lanyard on. He helped put the bike on the scales to be weighed when I checked in, stayed with me while I retaped some parts of the bikebox, walked me over to the outsize baggage dropoff, asked me for a luggage barcode, helped get it onto the conveyor. I took a photo of the box, got a thumbs-up from the people behind the desk, and headed off. I didn't see the bike go along the conveyor, into the handling area and out of reach, like I normally do.
Luggage barcode? I've been unhealthily paranoid about the bike all trip and this should have set me off, but it didn't until too late. Normal people don't ask for luggage barcodes. Airport staff might. People pretending to be airport staff shouldn't.
So I spent the flight to Madrid fairly sure that the bike was gone. I was so confident I wrote a list of all the things in the bikebox for the insurance claim.
But when I got to Madrid and had Wifi, I checked and the AirTag on the bike hadn't been seen since the time I dropped it off. That was a relief: if the bike had been taken out of the airport, I'd expect the Airtag would have been picked up.
And it arrived in Amsterdam. (Nearly an hour after the luggage arrived on the carousel, outsize baggage always takes ages.) But the box was open, all the tape holding it shut was ripped. There was no other damage to the box, so it doesn't seem likely that it happened through mishandling...
From left to right: I explained that I needed a bigger vehicle for the bikebox, I didn’t get one, but we made it work. The bikebox when I left it. And when it arrived. The window view when I left Santiago in summer. Amsterdam in winter. My cast.
So my guess is that the helpful stranger used the luggage sticker to claim the bikebox was his, and got it open. But inside was a worn, dirty, working bike, not some shiny and elegant carbon fibre racer, so it's not worth his time to steal ... and he put it back on the conveyor.
As far as I can tell nothing is missing.
The other news is that the wrist problem is actually a broken bone. In my defence: the doctor couldn't tell if I had a broken bone either, and referred me for an X-ray. That showed one of the small bones in my hand is broken so my arm's in a cast and probably will be for six weeks.
So this trip did take a bigger toll than I would like. I'm not keen to do another ride ...
... anytime soon.
