Our European Adventure

Yahoo! We had finally had our fill of museums and saphira could do something fun! Our hotel was really close to Villa Borghese, which is basically this massive park/garden with cafes, cinemas, art galleries, and even a zoo inside its walls! Our immediate plan was to hire out one of those weird tandem bike things… not like the ones where one person sits at the front and the other one at the back and they both pedal while the front person steers. Way worse. It was more like a flintstones style car than anything I’ve ever seen. We had to sit side by side on this awful bench seat with saffi squeezed in the middle. There was a little basket on the front (I put my jumper in it, where it stayed for about two seconds before it went flying down the road behind us like a big brown flag) and there was a tiny little steering wheel, controlled by the person on the left.

Being the person on the right was crap because you had no control over where you were going. There were no seatbelts or doors, and the roads were hilly and pebbly. So if you saw a ditch on your side, your only choice was to turn your own, entirely useless steering wheel and scream, “Wwhooooaaa!!!”

Suffice to say, we ended up fighting the whole time:

“Turn!”

“No no, it’s fine, we have to go this way,”

“Noo! TURN!”

“I CAN’T!!”

“Then let me drive!”

“Fine! But you’ll be crap at it!”

“WATCH THE ROAD!!”

“I AMMM!!”

etc etc.

It was really fun.

Well, okay, it wasn’t totally fun, especially when we ended up on an actual road with cars and buses and motorbikes trying to whizz past us while we pedalled along, still yelling at each other and screaming every time we hit a bump! Oh, and the brakes! They were so screechy and loud and every time we went down a hill we freaked out and slammed on the brakes (same person who steered had to operate the squeaky handbrake as well – stupid!) and all these Italian people were death staring us for the noise (like we could help it) while Mel complained, “none of the other bikes make such a horrible noise, this is CRAP!”

Oh my gosh, I’m giggling just thinking about how ridiculous we looked that day. We returned the useless thing early just to save our own sanity, even though we made ourselves go round the block one extra time just to get our 10 euro worth. It really was a disaster, AND by the time we got to the zoo it was closing time. What a rip.

Our frolic through the autumn leaves put us in a better mood and we went to bed thinking we’d had a pretty awesome day. Just ignored the whole bike ride extravanganza.