Biking Adventure...

Yesterday Ashley, Jean and I went on a biking adventure all around Duesseldorf with Margot. Margot is Jean's host mom and mine and Ashley's host mom's mom. She is a 67 year old woman who is in great shape. She put us all to shame on the bike trip. Granted, she bikes around everywhere and has a bike with speeds and a padded seat. We haven't ridden bikes in awhile, and we got the old, extra, hand-me-down bikes. Mine was the "Lady Rose"-a really tall, bright pink bike that was made in the 70s and squeaked something awful. The height was good for my bad knees, but bad for when we were stopped. I could barely skim my toes on the ground, and I have long legs! My bike's wheel span was about 3 times Jean's wheel span. Jean was on the Hercules, which I think was a child's bike, borrowed from Helga. Neither of our bikes had speeds, which was interesting. Ashley had the most normal bike of all-the Torpedo which had 3 speeds. However, after hours of riding around town, all of us were hurting badly. The morning was very pleasant and nice. Helga came along in the morning when we rode up the Rhine to Kaiserswerth, where pretty much everyone in the family was born. We went through castle ruins and went
into a pretty 900 year old church, saw a hospital and an old-folks home. The scenery to and from and around Kaiserswerth was very pretty, and Margot made sure to point out a good pub that we could take the U-Bahn to and meet friends. For good food of course. After being gone for 4 hours in the morning, we had about an hour long break before biking again into the city for Dusseldorf parade. We got there right when it started at 4:30 and stood across the parade route in the park from the important people-the Lord Mayor and some other dressed up people, and 3 women wearing tiaras. There were so many flowers and flags and funny costumes. Some were modern and some were very very old school, like from the 1600s. As far
as we could figure out, each new group was a little "village" and they were dressed in the style of the time they were founded. It was pretty cool. All the music and festivities reminded us of march-in before Aggie football games. Random things that remind us of home are the best. Our biking adventure was exhausting, but fun, great exercise, and it made the host mom happy, which is always a good thing!