I have so much to write about in regards to Kurucaşile because we ended up staying for 10 nights so I’m procrastinating a bit! In the mean time, I thought I would write a post that is a bit more concrete and finite. After our week and a half in Kurucaşile, we spent about five days in Istanbul. We had two main goals there:
- Pack Selim’s bike
- Figure out how to sell my bike
In this post, I will talk about how we packed Selim’s bike. For some context, both of our visas were on the brink of running out and we therefore had flights scheduled to Tunis and New York respectively. We had originally planned to give ourselves 10 days in Istanbul but as we loved Kurucaşile, we had a hard time leaving. I’ll write more about our time in Istanbul soon but this post is dedicated to our experience making Selim’s bike box. Part of our desire to give ourselves a few days in Istanbul was in order to pack Selim’s bike into a cardboard box so he could later check it as oversized luggage with Tunisair.
When Selim had traveled in the past, he had never brought his bike on an airplane, aside from his flight to Istanbul from Tunis. He had always bought and sold or given away his bikes in-country. In Tunisia, his friends helped him disassemble and pack his bike. But in Turkey, he didn’t have any experienced help so he was a little more nervous. Also, he would be taking public transportation to the airport rather so that added another level of complication. He needed to be able to carry his boxed bike and his two heavy panniers.
For this reason, we decided to create a wheeled bike box so he would be able to push it. Selim got the idea from a man he met in the airport in Tunis. The man had a son who frequently traveled with his bicycle for competitions. He advised Selim to add wheels the next time he traveled with his bike box. Selim kept this advice in mind during the three months we were in Turkey and was keen to try it out at the end!
The first step was getting a cardboard box for Selim’s bike. This is pretty much mandatory if your traveling with a bike on a plane. Perhaps there’s other alternatives but I don’t know of them. His bike is around 12 kilos so the box needed to be rather sturdy and not too big and not too small. The Goldilocks of boxes! It’s definitely possible to use a television box but Selim ended up purchasing a bike box from a shop for 100 TL. We went around to a few stores and asked if they gave them away but evidently, not anymore. Some vendors told us they needed the boxes because they do online sales. Others probably just wanted to make money. We were quoted up to 200 TL for a cardboard box.
Once he had the box, the real fun began. We started scouting the trash for packaging material like Styrofoam. Selim also had the idea to find small pieces of wood to put in the bottom of the box so we would have a surface to screw the wheels into. We then went to look for wheels at a home improvement shop. The one we went to was a small family-run business, a five minute walk from our AirBnB in Istanbul. Selim explained his project to the son of the father-son duo running the shop. He counseled Selim on the appropriate wheels to buy as there were different sizes that could hold different amounts of weight. We were originally thinking to get four wheels but the shop-owner encouraged us to do six so we went with that. Selim ended up buying 6 wheels at 8 TL each so 48 TL. The man told us to bring the wheels and the box to his shop the next day and we could use his tools to put everything together. Take a look at the pictures below to see how it worked out!
- Finding packing materials and wood in trash.
2. Buying 6 wheels that could sustain the weight of Selim’s bike.
3. Bringing the box to the shop
4. Preparing pieces of wood so that we would be able to screw the wheels through the box and into the wood.
5. Putting pieces of wood into bottom of the box. The wheels will be on the outside of the box and you will attach them to the wood through the cardboard.
6. Voila! Rolling our new bike box to the AirBnB.
What we needed:
- screws to fit holes in the wheel attachment points
- carboard box to fit bike
- packing materials for inside the box
- scrap wood pieces
- 6 wheels
- drill
- kind people 🙂
