All in all, the bikes arrived relatively unscathed. However, there were some minor issues discovered when unpacking. Luckily, it is easy to deal with these things from the comfort of our own home. On the scale of things, these are pretty small issues. We’ll have the bikes up and running again in no time.
Jennifer’s front bike light was damaged beyond repair, but I was unable to capture a picture of it before it ended up in the trash.
Did they use the Samsonite Gorilla to handle your baggage? Oy! Hopefully it won’t cost you much to repair or replace the broken items.
The light was a cheap one, and was already not all that great (the battery compartment wouldn’t latch) before the trip. So no big loss there. We have plenty of other cheap bike lights around the house too.
The bent shifter thingy – we had a few spares, and I was also able to straighten it out, so that was fine.
We haven’t tried straightening Zach’s seat brackets yet, but he looked up the cost of a new seat and it is about $400 if he has to replace it. I’m not sure how that managed to get bent — they must have piled something really heavy on top of that duffel bag! I’m also wondering if we can get the airline or insurance to pay for it, if we can’t fix it — we’ll see.
–Jennifer