Darin Wants More Adventures

Well, not much has been up recently (except going to Amsterdam on a class trip, but I don't really feel like writing about that), but Darin has recently demanded more adventures, so here I am, filling the needs of my adoring public.

As I may have explained earlier, I live in a town called Hattem, and have to bike to a different town, Zwolle, to go to class every day. Today, this trip took Dustin and I thirty minutes because we had to ride into a vicious headwind. But my story is not about today, rather, the excitement of my week took place yesterday.

It was about 8:20 in the morning when Dustin and I took off for school. The paths were a bit icy due to some unpleasant freezing rain, but we were chugging along on our "Omafietsen," our "Grandma Bikes," slowly but surely. We came to a fairly major road, it had two lanes which in the Netherlands qualifies it as a major road, that we had to turn on. No problem, there wasn't much traffic as usual, so we turned across the major thoroughfare onto the red bicycle lane on the other side of the street. Almost immediately afterward, we needed to take another turn onto a not so busy street; a one-laner if you will. As Dustin found out the hard way, this less travelled street still had a nice thick coat of ice on it, and as my brave counterpart turned on to the street, the tires of his new black one-speed slid out from underneath the black frame, and both bicycle and rider went sliding across the iced cobblestones.

This was, of course, quite a humorous scene, and I wish you could have seen it; fortunately I was quite priveleged to have witnessed it, so I was chuckling to myself while I prepared to mock my riding companion, backpeddling on my two-wheeler to bring it to a halt (because these nice bikes of ours don't have hand breaks, rather they have the type of breaking system that bicycles for young children have that you must peddal backwards to bring the bike to a stop). Well it seems that breaking was not the best choice in this situation, because the ice decided to laugh at me as well. Yes, no longer than two metric seconds later (because the Dutch use the Système International d'Unités rather than our imperial system), I was doing the side-stroak across the ice-laden street like Dustin, still laughing hysterically. The simple irony of the story is the icing on top of the cake, the cherry on top of the ice cream, the whipped cream on top of the pudding, or any other final ingredient for a dessert you feel most comfortable with. The irony is that the only people to witness our ice-dancing fiasco was the drivers of the large, street-salting vehicle that turned onto the road behind us.

Darin, I hope this provided the fix for your adventure story cravings.