Biking Blues

Yesterday we began the day in Villa de Leyva, yet another frozen in time colonial city. We headed off with our rental bikes and an ambitious agenda of various sites. As you may remember, on my bike trip in Nicaragua last year I ran into a bus and scraped myself up. This year, merrily wheeling along about 6 k into the countryside, off drops my left pedal, leaving me in quite a precarious position and, of course, Roger was miles ahead and nowhere in sight. I plodded on, walking the bike, until he finally realized I was way behind and waited for me. He tried but had no luck getting it to stay on. There was one modest little house, so we knocked on the door and explained our problem as best we could. Luckily, Meghan Finn had taught me the word for "tools" before I left. Out she came with a big bag of tools. R. fiddled and farted around and then she got in there, pulled off some cap and tightened it right up. Off we rolled to see the world-s largest kronosaurus skeletons found on site along with various other fossils and then on to the Dominican monastery. However, as we set off for the Colombian Stonehenge, the pedal came off again. R kept putting it on and tightening it with a coin but it would only last 5 min. So we hid the bikes in the bushes, locked them up and walked to the indigenous archeological site. Once there we had the caretaker call our hostel and send a truck to pick us up. We didn-t get to our 4th site, but all in all it was a good day and we were worn out. However, we-ll walk or use the bus from now on.