Week of Mar 18, #1 Elders and their bikes

More teaching with the elders this week. This is really one of our favorite things to do, and we are always grateful to help out. Sometimes they just need help with transportation - they have big areas to cover on their bikes. Other times their investigators have questions or circumstances where a couple with more experience and maturity can help them better understand the lessons the elders are teaching.

The elders really put a lot of use (and sometimes abuse) on their bikes. Each elder owns his own bike - most are purchased from elders leaving the mission. There are some purpose-built missionary bikes that I have seen, and they seem to hold up very well. Others are not as well built, and don't have the same durability. Of course there is always a balance between price and quality, and missionary bikes are no exception.

I bought a really good Yakima bike rack that mounts on the spare tire of the Liberty. I got it to transport my own bike to an area where I can safely ride it for exercise, but those areas are hard to find, and some of the roads that I would like to ride are really not safe - due to small or nonexistent shoulders outside of the painted line, and steep dropoffs. Since much of the area around here is swampy, or at least the water table is high during the rains, the roadbeds are built up high - sometimes as much as 8 - 10ft higher than the land around. This keeps the roads protected during the wet season, but it is actually fairly dangerous - if you drive off the pavement, there's a good chance you'll be into a rollover, and there have been some nasty, and fatal accidents due to this.

There is supposed to be a "3-foot rule", meaning that motorists by law are supposed to make a minimum of 3ft clearance between their vehicles and any bikers or pedestrians they pass. But after having a few cars pass with much less distance than that to me, I have decided that it's better to be safe than sorry on a bike.

So far, a few of the elders in our district have had problems with their bikes that require more than a simple turn of the wrench, or putting the chain back on. So far, the bike rack has been really handy for transporting the elders's bikes - when we find them pedaling along, if they have an appointment a long ways out, or if there has been an "incident". Luckily, incidents mean that they have smacked a curb, hit an obstacle or other event that disables the bike. Nothing involving another vehicle or bloody tumbles yet. We continue to pray for their safety. I have found a good bike shop in town that understands the missionaries are on very limited budgets, and they give me a good deal on repairs. So far, bent wheels, broken spokes, broken pedals, snapped cables, and flat tires seem to top the list. We always try to help them out in any way that we can.