Saturday during the bike ride, I remembered a story from a while ago. You know, one of the stories that you will remember every now and then sitting down with friends. Well this is one of those:
Way back when I was young and restless and in college, my best college friend got an assignment from her dad. Her dad owns a leasing company for cars (or did at the time) and for one of their customers the lease was up. The customer lived up in Hamburg which is a 7 hour drive to where we went to school on a good day (= no traffic jams). So we got the assignment to bring his new car to him and take the old car back and while we were up there, we were able to spent some time with her mother. Win, win and win. The ride up was a breeze. We had a brand new Mercedes C-Class (if I remember correctly) as a ride and just had a blast road tripping and having girl time.
On the last day of the trip we drove into a surburb of Hamburg to exchange cars. The guy was older and if I remember correctly a doctor. While we were handling some of the paperwork, we had some issues with a fax machine (paper jam) that he tried to remedy it by stuffing even more paper into the machine. It took forever to take care of everything and I can't even remember anymore what exactly the holdup was.
When we were finally done, he gave us the car radio that he had removed, because he didn't want to tempt anybody to break into the car to steal it. Even back then, nobody was getting into the hassle of breaking into a car to steal a regular radio plus tape deck. Once we were in the car, we stuffed the radio back into the console and had to find out that the security system works and that thing wouldn't play unless we entered a PIN... And of course the PIN was nowhere to be found. We ended up driving home for at least 7 hours (I think there were traffic jams, but not sure) with no music. Zipp. Nada. Nothing.
Since I was the passenger, I felt like I had to entertain my driver on this looooong tip. So I started singing... A lot... Random songs... Just a couple of lines each time, because (of course) I don't know so many song lyrics from the top of my head. Let me say that my playlist was shorter than one of the local top 40 radio stations. You get the picture. For whatever reason, I had the line "science book, french I took" going around in my head and it probably took me half the trip to remember the melody and the rest of the song.... But whenever I hear the song or remember the line, it triggers all of those memories about this trip.
How did I remember this random story while being on my bike? Well, I don't use iPods and sometimes, when I am on the road all alone, I entertain myself with singing. Well, maybe not singing but squeezing out a couple of notes between my huffing and puffing. And the funny thing is: I am NOT alone. We live at a fairly well frequented cycling route and you would be surprised by the amount of cyclists singing to themselves! We sure seem to be on the road to happiness on our two wheels! ;-)
Other than that? It's Monday.
So long! ;-)
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