Wales
Possibly the biggest freak coincidence of my life: Joe, with his state of the art electronic gears, suffers a complete gear failure - that is no coincidence - that is exactly what you expect new technology to do. Nor is is a coincidence that it should lock in the highest gear at the very bottom of a steep climb - that is aslo to be expected. So we accepted our (or more to the point, Joe’s) misfortune and started pushing our bikes for what we expected to be a very long climb, followed by a painful search for a bike shop in this remote part of Wales. And turing the first corner of the first serpentine, there literally in the woods is - miracle of miracles - a bike shop. That was freakish enough, but this wasn’t any old bike shop. In 2017 nobody uses electronic gears, and no bike shop I have ever been to specialised in them (and believe me, there is no shortage of bike shops I have been to). This one did. They had the laptop, the software, the cable - everything. Download the latest firmware update from the Shimano service portal, flash it onto the gears and presto - as good as pulling a wire to shift grears again.
