5 weeks to go
I've been looking around for new destinations for the weekend ride, and found a good one: Germany! I can get over the border and back to Nijmegen in about 7 hours, then it's a two hour trainride back home.
The weather for the weekend is pretty awful; lots and lots of rain. Saturday is marginally better so that's the day to go. The weather forecast was for light rain until midday, then wind. I started at 9am in my sweater but realized pretty quickly it was just going to get soaked. So I switched to raincoat and it stayed on. For the whole day. It’s that kind of weather.
Getting to Germany and back to Nijmegen in seven hours leaves no time for side trips; the route is pretty direct. It still goes through a lot of green areas away from the road which is nice. These semi-offroad paths are usually fine gravel. They're good for cycling, though: the stones are not so small that they are sandy and difficult. But: the grit is picked up by the back wheel and sprayed up and back. Some goes on the panniers, but most goes on the raincoat, though some will cake your shorts too. The water runs off but the grit stays on, then it dries hard, and cleaning it off is a dismal chore. There's a lot of it: I've got off the bike and found a small handful of packed grit on the saddle, presumably runoff from the coat.
From left to right: I haven’t been posting cake pictures only because I haven’t been having cake. Saturday lunch. Selfie practice, try to look upbeat about seven hours of rainy riding. Rail+bike bridge. Opening bridge which I was a bit too slow to capture. Random windmill.
But that's getting ahead of things. It was a wet morning, often raining, drizzling and misty when not. Raincoat not umbrella weather. It was so wet I put the raincover on my cellphone; I haven't actually ever done this before, including during actual monsoons.
A bit before midday my phone hits 20% charge and the low battery warning pops up. This happens every long ride; I'm used to doing a charge at about lunchtime. I keep my battery in my frame bag specifically so I can stop and plug in and get moving in a few moments.
So I plug the battery in and the phone shows the error message "Charging Not Available: Liquid has been detected in the Lightning connector."
This has never happened before. And it's serious - a dead phone is a trip-ender. Since a waterlogged port does sound reasonable, I dutifully unplug everything, and put the phone in my raincoat pocket and zip it up, to try to dry it out. But I've been out getting rained on all morning and nothing I touch is dry. My hands are wet, my gloves are sodden, the battery and cables have water on them. Putting the phone into my raincoat pocket brought in so much water this plan "to try to dry it out" is not really realistic; we're at "I hope Apple designed for this sort of thing" and getting close to "Siri I need to buy a bag of rice".
From left to right: Dutch … mountain goats? Context. Good road, bad weather. Hilversum. Bad road, bad weather - the last photo before the recharge problem appeared. Random cow statue; I was conserving phone battery but still had to take this.
Did I mention the phone has my route? Since I unplugged my headphones it's giving directions over speakerphone. I've turned the volume up but it's zipped into a raincoat pocket so it's quite muffled. It's so hard to hear that when it talks I'll stop pedalling, to reduce ambient noise.
In addition the audio directions are often ambiguous. "Turn right" can mean "the right lane turns into a cycle lane". "Turn left" can be "keep going straight"; cycle routes branch off for road crossings and the GIS data is characterful instead of standardized so I can understand how it gets confused. In short: I need to check the map screen often. But that can't happen with the phone zipped into a pocket.
So the new plan is: take the best guess, and listen out for "do a U-turn" and "your route is being recalculated" which is how the route app complains that I'm on the wrong road. Which mostly worked.
After a while I tried the battery again; liquid was still being detected so it wouldn't charge.
The phone was now at 18%, and given how wet everything is, I won't be surprised if it detects liquid all day. I've got another four or five hours of riding to Germany, and the phone isn't going to make it. I don't think I can find my way there on vibes, and I'm also not very excited about getting rained on and getting lost at the same time.
Time to find a cafe so I can get everything dried out and recharged. And get a coffee, naturally. After a few false hopes (B&B, upmarket restaurant, gelato bar, retirement home) I pass a McDonalds. I peer through the windows trying to see where the electrical sockets are. Not sure. I head inside before it gets weird, get a hot chocolate, get upsold a chocolate biscuit (well played, McDonalds) and find a table by an electrical socket.
There's no napkins available, but my hot chocolate comes with four. I dry my fingers, the charging cable, the phone, the Lightning socket, take the phone out of the case just in case there's more water there and dry both (there was a single small drip), dig out the power-to-USB plug. Put it all together, plug it into the wall.
“Charging Not Available: Liquid has been detected in the Lightning connector.”
This is why I bring backup cables. The backup cable has been safely inside the electronics bag, it's bone dry. I plug it in. Same error...?
This is why I bring a backup phone. Time to revive it. It's wrapped in plastic, inside the plastic electronics bag, inside the waterproof pannier. It's not just dry it's dusty. I plug it in. The battery is completely dead, so it needs a minute. It boots up, success! So I download the route and start wondering how much battery I will need and how long I should stay here. Then it gets to 4% and stops charging because liquid was detected in the Lightning connector.
This is why I should have brought the icon of St. Isidore of Seville, patron Saint of inexplicable technology problems, to protect against this sort of thing, because healthy amounts of preparation evidently isn't enough.
Just in case it wasn't clear, this was the backup phone, with my backup cable, and the wallplug. None had been rained on. They'd all been stored in plastic bags until I was inside. If Dorothy Parker reviewed silica gel, it wouldn't be drier. I'd like to say I'm sure there's a rational explanation but either the error message was misleading or there was a very unlikely chain of events.
(I did re-dry everything and then try every single combination of cables and phones and charge methods, but nothing worked and it's boring so let's skip over that part.)
So. My phones are at 15% and 4% and I guess I'm not going to Germany today. I could use the last of the battery to navigate to Utrecht and take the train home. Actually, there's a better idea: navigate to Utrecht and ride home along the Amsterdam-Rijnkanal, which is a major waterway so this is definitely not vibes-based navigation.
All go. Set up the route, download for offline use, I should get moving ASAP to get as far as I can before my phone dies.
Remember the thing about the raincoat? I didn't. The back of my raincoat had been sprayed by the fine grit on all the paths, and when I got up I leave a very unwelcome gritty smear on the seatback. McDonalds has been economizing by not making napkins available, so I couldn't clean it up. Efforts Were Made.
Outside it's cold, and raining, and that's fine when you're putting out 200 watts but not when you're needing to carefully repack the electronics bag and get the bike ready. It's an extra reason to get a move on, which I did. I’m tempted to head into the drive-through for a takeaway coffee, but the weather is so awful I don't. I roll out the pedestrian exit, cross the highway, turn left onto the cycle lane, change up, and realize that with the rain and time pressure I probably won't have an opportunity to eat the sandwiches I brought along.
The phone charge drops from 15% straight down to 1%. It's probably an intentional user interface thing, so people are motivated to charge their phone. I'm motivated to go faster. The cycle path is unimpeachable, I zip along at high speed to Utrecht. The route is nice and uncomplicated and follows major roads. The phone stays alive until I've found the canal and don't need directions any more. Then it points me down a quiet sidestreet that’s probably safer, but it’s heading away from the canal, so I don’t take it. It turns off, probably from the extra work to converse with the servers to figure out a new route, but it could also be petulance.
The rain eases up in the afternoon but it's still raincoat weather for the whole ride home. I wind back through all the places I'm familiar with: the ferry, the bridge over the tributary, the various road and rail bridges crossing the canal, finally the huge multilane highway bridges on the south side of Amsterdam. Roll under both, take a left and it's the home stretch. Then it's the same detours and roadworks I passed this morning but in reverse. And home, to do a lot of careful gear cleaning and eat something before I get too hangry.
In all it was 90km, so a bit shorter than I'd like but still a respectable day out considering the rain. While the weekend was nasty, the weather improves a bit as the week goes on.
So next weekend, maybe I'll have another try at getting to Germany.
