This Is What You Get When You Go Soft

After eight or nine days of rainy weather on the South Island, I was sick and tired of being cold and wet, so this one night I decided not to camp. I’d wimp out and get a hotel room. But since I’m on an adventure, not a vacation, I don’t have a reservation anywhere. On any given morning, I have no idea where I’m going to sleep that night. Which, by the way, is a wonderfully freeing way to live. This vagabond existence is so simple: ride, cook, write, sleep. Same order every day. It’s a hard life but a simple life.

But some days you don’t want life to be any harder, and on this particular day I decided being dry and warm would be a nice change of pace. So I stopped in a tiny town and looked for a room. I won’t say which town, because there are only so many places to stay there, and I think running a small business is hard enough without some tourist douchebag giving you bad press.

Not one room is available in the whole town, but bicycle karma was with me: a hotel owner said she’d open a disused room for me. They call it the backpackers room and they used to use it for overflow. It’s in the back of a defunct café. A small room with a toilet but no shower, with one of these weird New Zealand bunkbeds with a queen mattress on the bottom and twin on top. Most importantly for my purposes, it had a ceiling, so for once I wouldn’t be rained on all night. I said perfect. The owner offered me a discount because she didn’t have time to get the room cleaned up. I had rolled into town too late and she was already getting dinner together for her kids. I said no problem, do your thing. So long as there’s no risk of bedbugs, I’ll just lay out my sleeping bag on the mattress.

Oh no, she says, we don’t rent to the kind of people who bring bed bugs. Oh yes you do, I thought. I’m renting an uncleaned room for the US equivalent of $15. Because she’s a nice person, she hooks me up with a fresh, clean pillowcase. Because this place is worth exactly $15, the fresh, clean pillowcase has blood stains on it.

But it ain’t cold and ain’t wet. Winner winner vegetarian dinner. And, as this is the back room of what used to be a café, I can even cook on a proper stove. I whip up my pot of mac & cheese and then I start eyeing the oven.

I have two pairs of socks, the wet pair and the dry pair. The wet pair hasn’t been dry in a week because my shoes haven’t been dry in a week. Too much rain, too many river crossings, never a sunny evening to lay everything out. So now the wrong thought comes bubbling up from my subconscious: what temperature would you bake shoes at to dry them?

This raises a host of other pressing questions. Is there a fire extinguisher handy? Is it ethical to use somebody’s oven to bake your shoes? Will the oven still be food-safe if someone were to use it to roast shoes and socks? Does it matter that nobody cooks food in there anymore?*

The oven‘s lowest setting is 100°. That’s Celsius, of course, so 212° Fahrenheit. Is 212° the melting point of a Hoka One One sneaker? No. My shoes are made of sterner stuff. But it is hot enough to cause all the water in the shoe to boil, which swells up the cushiony bit like a marshmallow. And it is above the melting point of the glue that holds those rubber grippy things on the bottom of the cushiony bit.

See, this is what happens. This is what you deserve when you get soft and you don’t want to camp in the rain anymore. This is your just desserts if you manage to make it to the age of 49 with so little knowledge of footwear and bakery. The glue of your shoes becomes gooey, and when the cushiony part rises like a beautiful soufflé, the rubber grippy bits peel off.

There is a silver lining: my socks dried nice and crisp without catching fire. And there were no bed bugs, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. As for my footwear, it was dry for all of ten or twelve hours before the rain came down the next day.

*Answer Key:

Yes

Depends on the answer to the next question

Yes if you crank the heat up afterward

No