Bonjour!

I have had a long and arduous relationship with the Bicycle. Like all kids I had a tricycle, and in time upgraded, thanks to my grandparents, to a blinged-out pink and sea foam green little girl bike with training wheels, and streamers on the handle bars...be jealous…However, living on the side of an exaggerated hill, with limited flat surfaces, it was very difficult for me to gain experience on my new set of wheels. And it wasn’t until I spent the summer I turned 7 with my grandparents that I learned how to ride my bike without the training wheels. Once I had become freed of the embarrassing training wheels I became obsessed with my bicycle, and the following Christmas Santa brought me my upgrade, a burgundy “Giant Awesome” Mountain Bike. It was neither really that Giant or Awesome, and I believe there might have been a Christmas day display of my only child syndrome, in the form of a crybaby fit over the fact that the bike wasn’t green – I’ve tried to block this out – but my bike became my favorite toy. Many a Saturday afternoon was spent biking the Cades Cove Loop or the Third Creek Bike trail with my Dad, and then one day it stopped. Maybe I got too old to ride my bicycle and opted to go to the mall instead…Maybe it was because a UT student was murdered on the bike trail and I was too freaked out to ever return…Maybe I just got Lazy…We’ll never know…
My reunion with the bicycle came the summer after my Sophomore Year of High School at a little thing I like to call “Ivens Family Boot camp – The Kiawah Island Edition” in which every morning started bright and early at 7am with a run, aka I would run out of sight and then hide behind a tree with the latest edition of Seventeen magazine, and every evening ended with a sunset Bike ride. Needless to say there had been some time between my last bike excursions and Boot camp. I was unprepared. I tried riding the bike around in the driveway to regain a feel for the freedom and I failed. I finally got good enough that as long as I was going straight and wasn’t expected to stop I could manage to stay off my knees, which was when we decided to take a bike ride through the salt marshes that surround all of the Carolina Barrier Islands. Bad idea. Salt marshes have lots of bridges, narrow bridges, and it was my first encounter with one of these bridges that I found myself pedaling off of the bridge and into the salt marsh. Needless to say I had a good cop-out of bike riding for the rest of the trip. It would be nearly five years till I would attempt to ride a bicycle again…

We go shopping, we visit art museums, we embrace the wander, we rifle through flea markets in hopes of finding a real diamond in the rough, and I realize that these are more me doing things while Zach tags along. Out of the goodness in my soul I try to do things on our trips each weekend that Zach wants to do, and so when he repeatedly expressed to me that he wanted to rent bicycles in Amsterdam, I finally relented. Sunday morning bright and early we headed to Mac’s Bikes to rent bicycles for the day. While I never shifted out of first gear, rode continuously with the brakes applied, lagged behind Zach at least 50 yards while walking my bike up every hill and over every bridge, shockingly enough I had fun. My butt was, however, less than thrilled about the journey - pretty positive its gonna be a while before I stop wishing for one of those donut shaped pillows people with hemorrhoids sit on…We rode down the Amstel River heading outside the city for a breath of fresh air, and to catch a glimpse of real working windmills.
The Netherlands are a beautiful country, something I would have never realized had I remained within the canals of Amsterdam which are often described as the rings of Hell…On the outside you have stately canal houses, quaint streets, and beautiful flowers…as one progresses into the center of Amsterdam you have the true heart of the city, the inner most ring of hell, crowded with coffee shops, selling their legalized marijuana and hallucinogenic drugs, and the Red-light District with its off color Live Shows and prostitutes in every window. I think that it speaks volumes for Amsterdam that while we were visiting, we tried, twice, to visit the two main Cathedrals in town, each time being met with locked doors - once in the middle of the afternoon - while only a street over the doors to the coffeehouse and the windows to the prostitutes were always open…Despite the Debauchery that generally characterizes Amsterdam, I loved the city. The Van Gogh museum was like nothing I had ever seen before, its collection was so comprehensive…The Anne Frank House was truly moving and the most tasteful museum of its sorts that I had ever been to…The Heineken Experience, was, well, a brewery, but was expertly laid out and a testament to Marketing know-how…The weather was fantastic, it was our first sunny weekend of the trip…And the Bike trip which took us through a Park, and old cemetery, the countryside and to a windmill, all contributed to this being a pretty fantastic weekend.
My pictures are as always up on my Webshots: . In addition to pictures of Amsterdam there are also pictures up of the GTL study abroad field trip to the WW1 battlefields of Verdun. This weekend Zach’s parents are coming for a visit, and we are heading to Dijon, the heart of wine country and where they make the mustard!
Lots of Love,
Hillary