Oxford ,

9.10.10

Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

At long last, Sean and I have finally made it to Oxford following a full day of sweaty, sticky, headwindy riding. Any notable things happen yesterday? Sure: We didn't die (at least not in the Biblical sense), we liberated a few debtors prisons (completely in the Biblical sense), and - you're not going to believe this - we ran into a bit of bike trouble. Well, pedaled into, actually. You see, the bike that I bought must have come out of the factory without its bottom bracket crank cartridge fully tightened, so over the course of these last 600 miles, it has slowly worked its way out and finally became noticeable yesterday. With the proper tool, this is a very simple and quick fix, but - without tools and without luck - I was in need of a mechanic to fix this small but potentially devsatating problem (that is how every bike problem is described: can cause serious injury or death. Is death, then, not a "serious" matter? Who would ever make light of death?!). The true kick in the teeth was that the bike shop was closed from 1-2 for lunch, so we were forced to wait an extra hour to get back on the road. I'm not at all used to places closing down for lunch, but it makes sense that the shop owner needs to eat sometime and that we customers should never see the bikesmiths without grease all over their hands and faces. Snacking, too, is out of the question. But what's an extra hour in the day of two guys with no concrete plans, any obligations, or real responsibilities? More than you would think, it turns out. (But still far, far less than any normal person with, say, a job or other perceived duty or any of these socially forged shackles that only serve to blind us and keep us from the things we would truly love to do, if only we had the time or the opportunity, which, we all know in this economy, is never there!)
Yes, very good, but I believe we were in the middle of a story of sorts. Perhaps we can finish our ranting some other time, hmmm?
Following the liberation of our third debtors prison, we were able to unload our miniguns and RPGs, which allowed for much quicker cruising speeds on the busy English roads. Nevertheless, the two hour break that the mechanics required and my hitting the glycogen-depleted wall prevented us from reaching Oxford before dusk, so we were forced to camp just outside of Burford for the night. Interestingly, we ran into our first emphatically rude and unfriendly person when asking for advice on camping. She made it perfectly clear that we were "certainly not camping in the garden" nor "certainly anywhere on [her] lawn." It is fine for someone to refuse the strange and burdensome request of pitching a tent on their lawn, but her coldness rubbed me quite the wrong way. As this was our first attempt to camp anywhere in England, and as this runs so severely contrary to our experiences in Ireland, I wonder if the Emerald Isle is just a priveleged place where only the nicest and most wonderful people live, while everywhere else in this awful, terrible world is populated by he-devils and she-witches and they-dragon-eating-goblinites-from-Mars. I would actually like to meet one of those last characters. Maybe in Amsterdam.
Ah, but before I could curse and condemn all of mankind, we discovered that the sour encounter was just a fluke and that even the English are kind. We pulled into a farmhouse down from the main road and were approached by an older woman who owned the place. When I filled her in with our journey and our intentions for the night, she immediately offered an entire lush field to use as camping grounds and asked if there was anything else we required for our stay. Ah, but this night we were fine just cooking by ourselves and did not want to lay too much on this woman, so we ate our rice and beans in peace with the wind howling through the barn and the night sky absolutely dominating the surroundings by 7:15. It was a very picturesque location, with extremely thick, forest-green grasses and a little river at the bottom of the property. However, the woman never told us she was an ally of the Machines, as she had in her employment a number of blinking, flashing droids that cut the grass by night. At first, we mistook the Machine for a lightning bug, which we were nearly positive did not inhabit this area of the world, but, upon noticing green and red flashes in addition to the familiar yellow ones, we were confused and downright worried. I was ready to blame the nearby nuclear power plants or global warming, such is my training as an American, when we discovered it was nothing more than a lawncare automaton.
But here we are in lovely, old Oxford! I adore this ancient city, packed to the brim with spires, many-hundred-year-old stones, and faces... faces everywhere! I am not certain when this happened, but over the last few centuries, we must have overcome an all-consuming obsession with stone faces, which is probably what has allowed us to devote more time to the development of wind energy and netbooks.
Tomorrow, we ride for Cambridge, but in the meantime, I will seek unfairly and with steep bias evidence to support the claim that Oxford is no match for Harvard. That's a cool thing to be doing, right?