Bike Thief Crashes Cyclists’ 86-Day Journey

It was 86 days of hard pedaling, from the pitted, gravel logging roads of Canada’s far north through the steep slopes of the Cascades in Washington and Oregon and on to California’s winding coastal highway.

But just two days before finishing their long ride from the Yukon to Los Angeles, 26-year-old Rupert Riedl and 24-year-old Christine Weber of Salzburg, Austria, were stopped by a bike thief in Ventura.

While they were camping at Emma Wood State Beach on Friday, a thief clipped the lock fastened to Riedl’s rare, $1,500 fat-tire Grizzly mountain bike.

“The first thing I thought was . . . well, you can’t print that,” said Riedl, a mountain-biking and snowboarding instructor. “I was just angry.”

Weber, a schoolteacher, said it was an awful way to finish the trip, which Riedl started July 4 and she joined three weeks later.

“I just feel so bad that someone would take a bike from people that have no other way to move,” she said.

A state ranger at the beach told the pair that the thief probably used the noise of a passing train to cover the sound of the breaking bicycle lock. The thief tried but apparently didn’t have enough time to cut Weber’s bike cable.

Fortunately for the pair, the night before the bike was stolen they met a good Samaritan and fellow biker, John Avery, who owns Open Air Bicycles on east Main Street.

While camping with his daughter’s elementary-school class, Avery met the traveling couple and offered to help them out if they needed anything when they passed through Ventura.

With just one bike and Avery’s name, the couple traveled the few miles from the campground to Avery’s shop. Weber rode on the handlebars and Riedl worked the pedals.

When they got to the shop, Avery welcomed them and made good on his offer to help, although it was a little more help than he had bargained for.

“I thought they might need a tire or something,” he said.

Instead, Avery ended up driving the couple around Ventura searching for the lost bike and letting them stay at his house.

“I didn’t want them to leave with a bad taste of America,” he said.

Avery and his wife also plan to help the couple get a ride to Los Angeles International Airport when they leave for Austria on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the couple is asking that anyone with information on the stolen bicycle call Open Air Bicycles at 653-1100.