Car Wreck

Freshman year was the year of bike wrecks, I had three pretty major wrecks that year. One has already been outlined in an earlier post. The other one was a typical flip over the handle bars. But the last wreck was pretty terrific, terrifying and tremendous.

I volunteer at a non-denominational youth group called K-Life. The K-Life house happens to be 10.2 miles away from campus. Not having a car I had to get there either by riding my bike or taking public transportation. Travel time was one hour with public transportation or significantly less if I rode my bike.

One gray, rainy day in April I walked outside to survey the weather before heading off to K-Life. The day was gray and overcast, but it hadn't rained all day and the clouds in the sky didn't appear to be any more ominous than they had been all day long. I decided that the rain would hold off so I hoped on my bike and began the ride to club.

I was about ten minutes away from my destination when it began to rain. I had already been riding for thirty minutes and since my math skills are so good I know that 10 min <<>

I was one block away from my destination and I had just one street left to cross. I was waiting patiently at the light for my turn to cross the intersection. The light turned to green and I began across the intersection. As I was in the middle the light turned straight to red. There was nothing to do but keep going.

As I got into the lanes of oncoming traffic I took a look over my right shoulder to see a car barreling toward me. I had just enough time to think, "This is gonna hurt." before BAM! I was hit.

The next thing I know I am lying in the middle of the road separated from my bike by 20 ft. I look over my shoulder again and again see cars rushing toward me. I knew that if I didn't get up and out of the road I would be run over as well as run into.

I quickly hopped up, grabbed my bike and ran out of the middle of the road. A tow truck had seen the accident and quickly pulled out into the middle of the intersection to prevent any more cars from going through, thus allowing me to pick up some of the extraneous pieces of my bike lying around.

The old lady who hit me pulled over and we waited for a police man. She was quite shaken up and I felt bad for her. So I told her that everything was ok. She wasn't convinced seeing as how there was blood all over my legs. The lacerations weren't actually that bad, the blood was just going everywhere because of the rain.

Finally a police officer showed up. He decided that it wasn't an accident (I don't know what it would be called then), and that I didn't need to go to the hospital because I was still standing so I obviously didn't break anything. The fist sized knot now protruding from my shin didn't mean a thing.

I called the people at K-Life and one of them came to my rescue. After club that night I was unable to stand my legs were in so much pain. It was at this point in time that I thought a visit to the hospital might be warranted.

When I checked into the ER I informed the receptionist that I had been hit by a car a few hours before. She told me to sit in the waiting room and I would be seen as soon as possible. I waited for five hours. And then the doctor didn't even bother to take an X-ray. I was told that I was fine and that I should just try to sleep it off.

That has been my last big bike accident for several years, and hopefully it will stay that way. The riding is lots more fun without the crashing.

Rule #2

Last night my friends Fiona, Liat, Caitlin, Katie and I made a spontaneous decision to go to an improv comedy club, Comedy Sportz. Fiona and I had previously been to a Comedy Sportz in Chicago and were quite excited to learn that there is also on in Houston.

During the show actors ask for request from the audience and then are required to play a game or create a scene on the spot involving the suggestions of the audience. Coming up with ridiculous suggestions and being loud have both been fortes of mine for quite some time so it wasn’t long before my presence was known inside the theater.

One of the games played involved audience participation. And being one of the more enthusiastic members there I was, somewhat reluctantly, chosen. The game that I played was chain reaction. Categories were suggested by audience members and the different teams then had to name objects in that category with the last letter of one being the first letter of the next. (Cars: Hyundai–> Intrepid–> Dodge–> Envoy etc.)

The last game of the evening involved three of the actors creating characters and while remaining in character giving advice to audience members on anything really. One audience member wanted to know about anagrams. The “ref” (emcee) for the evening began to ask what exactly an anagram was.

His first gander was “one of those words that reads the same forwards and backwards”.

I quickly offered a “No, that is a palindrome”.

Next an audience member said, ” words that sound the same like to, and two”.

Fiona and I responded , “NO, that is a homonym.”

The ref then turned to me and said, “Well, what is it then, Caroline?“

“An anagram is when you take the letters of one word and rearrange them to for other words.”

“OK, fine. And what is your question about anagrams that you would like our friends to answer?”

“How many words can you make out of the letters in “planets”?”

(Previously in the evening this had actually been our topic of conversation. The word planets has all of the most common letters and thus lends itself to being very good at this game. In “Te Da Vinci Code” it is mentioned that 92 words can be made using only these letters.)

The characters then began to answer the question according to the persona of each. One of the characters lived his life by two rules and thus answered every question with two rules. As an answer to my question he said “Rule number one: It doesn’t matter*. Rule number two: Date Caroline. She’s going places.”

Don't forget Rule #2

Don’t forget it either.

*I don’t actually remember what rule number one was. But it obviously isn’t as important as rule #2.

I was distracted

So, this whole "let's write stories down for posterity/amusement of others/fake online community I like to pretend exists" has kind of failed. In my defense though, I was updating blogs regularly this entire time. I was in Germany from Feb. to Aug. 2009. During that time I kept lovely blog of my adventures. Then when I returned to school one of my assignments for class was to write a daily blog about what I was reading. That one no longer exists since it was set up through the school otherwise I would give you the link to prove that I was doing something. Not that anyone actually cares, not that anyone actually read this. I know you are thinking by now, "I thought this was going to be a blog of stories. Where is the story?" Here it comes.

....

When I graduated high-school I requested that everyone get me money as a gift. I wanted cold-hard cash. No new towels, dorm room organizers, or other cutsie things. I wasn't trying to be greedy, I had a plan for all that dough. I wanted to buy a bike. When I got to campus the first thing that my parents and I did was hit up a local bike shop.

After some thinking I decided that a mountain bike would best suit my purposes. You sit up straighter on them, they go off curbs way better, and if I crashed they tend to be a little bit sturdier. I walked away with a men's large, black, Specialized Hardrock. I named him Stealth.

I rode Stealth every single day. He was my only form of transportation, but I didn't let that slow me down. I used him to get to class, the grocery store, downtown. Stealth and I went everywhere together.

Fast forward to the end of the semester. My friend, Kate, wanted to go to the Central West End for an art gallery opening. We decided that we were going to ride our bikes to the metro station, take the metro to the Central West End and then ride to the gallery. After going to the opening we were going to meet some of our other friends at the ice skating rink in Forest Park.

When we got to the metro station we were greeted by signs informing us that the metro was unable to run because the tracks had iced over in the recent storm. Kate and I were pretty bummed out when we heard this. But then we thought to ourselves, "We have mountain bikes, snowy terrain is no match for our supper studded tires. And besides, the roads were clear so we wouldn't have to deal with that much snow."

We took off down the sidewalk of Forest Park Parkway heading for Forest Park. Riding on the sidewalk through the snow and ice it took us 15 minutes to go a grand distance of half a mile. That should have been our second big clue to turn around and go back to the comfort of our nice heated dorm. But, as my mother tends to remind me, freshmen's brains are still underdeveloped and immature and this leads to poor decision making. So we kept trekking.

We finally reached the entrance to the park and were able to ride on the road without having to worry about the very heavy traffic on some of the other roads. Inside the park, the snowplows had done a fantastic job clearing the snow and ice and putting down salt. We buzzed along to the other side of the park. We reached a bike path that we knew would take us closer to our destination than the road we were following would. We hesitated for a moment knowing that we would lose the smooth sailing that the plowed, salted road had provided for us. Upon quick visual inspection the bike path didn't look too treacherous though. There was hardly any snow on it at all. We took off into the darkness.

We were flying along the path and weren't more than 30 yard in when suddenly my bike flew out from underneath me. I had hit a patch of black ice and my bike went wildly out of control. I crashed to the ground so hard and fast that I didn't have time to put my hands down.

I opened my eyes, dazed, confused and really cold. It took me a moment to realize that I when I had crashed I had broken through the ice into a puddle of water several inches deep. I got out as quickly as I could and started shaking mostly from the frigid temperatures but also probably from the immense amount of adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Kate is an EMT and knew that we needed to get me someplace to warm up and dry off, and we needed to get there fast. We dismounted from our bikes and made a beeline for the nearest exit and and the St. Louis Bread Co. that we knew was in the area.

I headed straight for the dryers in the bathroom while Kate attempted to contact the people we were supposed to be meeting for ice skating. Kate entered into the bathroom with a concerned look on her face a couple of minutes later. She had just been on the phone with our friends and they had divulged that they were on foot, at night, in Forest Park and that there was a truck of men who had been drinking following them.

I told Kate that we had to get to them fast because they had absolutely no common sense, I know I obviously don't either since I went biking in these conditions, but I have more than they do. We grabbed our bikes and headed into the park and to try and locate our friends. The search was a long one. Our targets didn't know the name of the street they were on and we were coming at them from an opposite direction, but after many descriptions of trees and cracks in the road we finally found them. Kate and I stayed on our bikes and assumed the position behind the girls walking and followed them to the ice skating rink.

When we arrived there was a police car waiting. The girls had called 911 while being followed. A few seconds later the red truck pulled in and the men were arrested for drinking and driving and possession of a weapon.

After seeing my friends safely at the rink I headed for home. It was a long slow ride with me being bruised and cold but I made it. When I finally entered my dorm, my clothes and hair were frozen solid, I didn't have feeling in my fingers and toes, and my teeth were chattering. I don't believe that a warm shower has ever been quite that wonderful and painful at the same time.

Paulina Bunyan

Two days after I graduated from high school I joined my Grandparents on a cross country road trip.  They have a house out in Idaho where they spend the summer.  The problem with such a house is that after a hard winter there is a lot of manual labor that needs to be done to open up the house.  That is where I come in.  Not only was I going along to aid in the driving to get there, I was mainly going to do all the lifting, hauling, stacking, painting that my Grandad could throw at me in the ten days that I would be there. 

One of the big chores that needs to be done is to thin out the aspen grove.  The aspen trees grow like weeds and to keep the whole grove healthy we constantly have to get rid of the old dead trees and the little trees underneath that aren’t going to grow fast enough because they aren’t going to get any sunlight because the mature trees are blocking it all.

This particular day we were working on getting rid of the mature dead and sick trees.  My Grandad, who was approximately 82 at the time, was wondering around with the chainsaw while I nervously followed him hoping that he wasn’t actually as unsteady on his feet as he appeared to be. 

You might be wondering why I didn’t have the chainsaw in my hands.  You see, I am a girl, and girls are incapable of using chainsaws.  However, I am a strong girl and therefore I am useful for holding the tree up at one end so that it can be cut into smaller logs to be used as fire wood. 

Grandad and I had cut up several trees.  While he was finishing up trimming some branches I headed over to the next tree that we had appointed as our victim.  I leaned against the tree to take a bit of a rest and felt it shift under my weight.  I pushed against the tree a bit harder and felt it groaning against the strain I was putting on it. 

I turned to the tree, placed my hands against the trunk and started rhythmically pushing against it until I had a solid sway going.  As I pushed harder and harder the tree began to sway rock more and more violently.  Suddenly there was a loud tearing noise as the tree fell over and the roots tore from the ground.  My Grandad looked up surprised.  “Thought I would save you a bit of work,” I said with a grin on my face. 

For the duration of my stay, whenever he introduced me to someone he would introduce me as Paulina Bunyan and tell this story.

Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear

The summer after my sophomore year in high school I got to go to Alaska with my family. While we were there we went on a float trip from a lake in the mountains where the river originated all the way down to the sea. It lasted a week and we fished the entire way down catching approximately sixty fish per day per person. (It was all catch and release with the exception of a couple of days where we ate a couple of the salmon that we caught.)

One of the hazards of being out in the Alaskan wilderness is coming into contact with rather large grizzly bears. I am still alive, kicking, and devoid of any large scars so I didn’t get into close contact with them, but bears were definitely something that we always had to watch out for.
After being in a rubber raft all day, my brother, Joseph, and I liked to stretch our legs so we would always go exploring around the campsite. One day we were walking along the bank of the river when we came upon a bloody salmon. It wasn’t one of the rotten / rotting salmon that we were used to seeing though. This one looked like it had been in great shape until rather recently. We went closer and noticed that the blood around the salmon was still bright red and runny. We started feeling a little nervous. We saw something in a patch of mud a little ways away and went over to see what it was.

It was a paw print of a bear. I was wearing a bucket hat and took it off my head and set it next to the print. The print was bigger than my hat. Joseph and I nervously looked at each other and then started to glance around. Our eyes found a ridge not too far away from where we were. We let our eyes wander up to a silhouette, the silhouette of a bear, a really big bear.

The two of us decided we shouldn’t run, that would probably be a bad idea, and so we acted like we were following another creek, one that conveniently lead back to the camp. We informed the guides of our discovery. They all immediately picked up their guns and went to check out the footprint and to see if they could scare the bear away. (Note: the guns were only for protection. They were shot only into the air to scare the bears so they wouldn’t get to close to us.)

That night no one slept that great, the thought of the bear just hanging around gave everyone the willies. The next morning when I woke up, the first place I looked was at the ridge, the bear was still there. Breakfast was a hurried affair that morning, everyone was anxious to get out of the bear’s way.

We found out later that the guides had all taken turns keeping watch all night long and that the bear had never been far away, always keeping an eye on the camp. (Because it was summer in Alaska, the sun almost never set and it rarely actually got dark.) During the trip, we sighted bears several more times, most often as they were on the shore and we were in the river, not as they were watching us sleep.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

On the train ride to Prague from Romania we had plenty of time to read up on the city in our guide books. We located the major sights that we would need to see in our limited time there, such as Charles’s Bridge, the Prague Castle, and the Lenin Wall. We were able to find out that marionettes are very common in Prague and there are many theaters devoted to putting on shows using these puppets. We were able to locate the hotel where we would be staying on a map. But one of the most interesting things that I read about in the guidebooks was that the Czech Mafia ran an official taxi service that charges many times more than what other taxi services charge.

I stashed this little tidbit of information in the back corner of my brain as I attempted to figure out how to say important phrases in Czech, such as “hungry” and “bathroom”. By the time our rather eventful train ride came to its conclusion I had almost forgotten what I had read.

We arrived in Prague and immediately went to the bathrooms in the train station where we had to pay to go in. Jennifer and I were both looking a bit worse for the wear after the train ride, but we decided that we would skip showers and naps, both things we were in dire need of, to get in as much sightseeing as we could before we dropped from exhaustion.

In order to get from the train station to the hotel we needed to take a taxi. The hotel wasn’t all that far from the station, but we both had rather large suitcases to get there and the streets of Prague were cobblestone which would make rolling the suitcases rather difficult. And neither of us had enough of a functioning brain to read the map to figure out how to get to the hotel.

Jennifer started following the signs toward “The Official Taxi”. I remembered what I had read as Jennifer approached one of the drivers and began inquiring about what the fare would be to take the two of us to the hotel. The driver looked at us, looked at the hotel address and the map, and back at us and announced that it would be 750 Kroner. (I don’t remember what the exchange rate was, but this was way too high.) Jennifer began to try and haggle with the driver, saying that it was too much money and she wasn’t able to pay that.

The driver just stared at her blankly as she tried to convince him that the fare was too high.

When she was finished talking the driver responded in Czech and it was my aunt’s turn to stare blankly. Neither party was having any success in winning the other person to his side when the driver said, “Sprechen Sie deutsch?” Jennifer continued to stare at him, not understanding a word of what he said. My ears perked up at this though. I had just finished my first year of studying German in high school and I knew enough to understand that simple question.

I responded with a quiet and hesitant “Ja” and stepped forward. Jennifer got a startled look on her face that quickly turned to one of apprehension. I could read in her expression that she was quite nervous that I was going to be taking over the negotiating in a language that she couldn’t understand. The driver and I started discussing prices. He lowered the price to 700 Kroner but that was still too much. I asked him how far away the hotel was, and he informed me that it was about 3 Kilometers away. I then calmly told him that we would just walk there and turned my back on the taxi queue and started towards the escalator that led out of the train station.

As I turned around I said to Jennifer under my breath, “Follow me, and don’t look back.” She grabbed her suitcase and followed me with a rather confused look on her face. When we got to street level, she asked me what I had said. I told her about what I had read in the guide book on the train. And I told her that I had told they driver that we were just going to walk.

She took out the map and began trying to orient herself. A taxi from the AAA Taxi service pulled up in front of us and the driver, who spoke very good English, asked us if we needed a ride. We showed him the address of our hotel and asked him how much it would be to get there and he told us it would cost 125 Kroner.

We threw our bags into the trunk and hopped into the back seat.

When we arrived at our hotel Jennifer paid the cabbie the 750 Kroner because she was so relieved to have found an honest cabbie. We headed into our hotel to drop off our bags before heading off sightseeing, and he drove away with one of the biggest grins I have ever seen.

Train to Prague

The summer after my sophomore year in high school I had the opportunity to go to Romania with my aunt, Jennifer, on a Habitat for Humanity trip. At the end of the Habitat portion of the trip we decided to go to Prague for a couple of days. To get there from Romania we had the option of traveling by plane or train. Upon inquiry we were told that the train to Prague took eight hours. I made the decision to take the train because it would be a good experience and I thought that it would be fun. It was definitely an experience.

We arrived at the train station in plenty of time to buy our tickets and to find our way to the correct platform. While we were wandering around inside the train station two young men approached us and wanted to move our bags for us. They had a flat fee listed on their cart that amounted to around five dollars. We decided that five dollars was worth it to save ourselves the trouble of attempting to negotiate extra large bags down an exceptionally narrow corridor.

When we got to our compartment the men were waiting to collect their pay. It was then that they informed us that the fee listed was per bag, and we had given them the bags, purses, and backpacks. The total cost they informed us was twenty dollars, per person. They actually expected us to pay them forty dollars to move our luggage. Unfortunately, we did because they threatened to take off with our stuff if they didn’t receive the money. No amount of haggling, talking badly about their country, or pretending not to have any idea what they were saying could lower the price.

After finally sending the con men away and still having all the luggage my aunt and I settled down for the journey. It was at this time that we actually looked at our tickets and realized that the departure time from Romania and the arrival time in Prague were far more than eight hours apart. They were actually twenty-five hours apart. We couldn’t believe it. We were going to have to spend over a day on the train. My aunt went to find a conductor hoping that there was a misprint. She came back with a long face and informed me that the tickets were indeed correctly printed and that we were going to have a very long ride ahead of us.

We settled in for the long haul. Out came the pillows and books from our bags so that we could amuse ourselves. After several hours the train reached the first border that we were to cross and a conductor and police came around to check papers and tickets. When the conductor finished looking at our tickets he informed us that the car that we were in was going to be left in Hungary and that we needed to change cars immediately or be left behind.

We grabbed our bags from where they had been stowed and ran down the corridors between cars dragging our luggage down the too narrow hallway looking for a car that was going to continue on to Prague. We finally found a car and just as we were safely inside we felt the train start to move underneath us and we saw the cars that we had just gotten off of being left in the distance.

We managed to find another compartment and settled down again. For a while we were the only two people in the compartment and we were hoping that the remainder of our journey would be rather uneventful. That was not to be.

After a while a couple of young Frenchmen joined us in our compartment. They appeared to be a pair of brothers, one in his twenties the other in his teens. The two of them kept whispering to each other and eyeing our belongings. Jennifer and I were getting sleepy but we decided that it was best if one of would remain awake to ensure that our things were safe. The brothers took turns watching us while the other one would go into the hallway of the train to smoke. Finally, they disembarked from the train and Jennifer and I were able to rest easy for a while.

The next companions in that joined us in our compartment were a Grandfather with his two young grandchildren. Almost as soon as they sat down the children began bickering. The Grandfather, who was apparently very used to the incessant fighting of the children, dosed off leaving the children to their own means to entertain themselves. They fought the entire time they were on the train yelling, pushing, punching, and in general causing a ruckus.

After the children left we were hoping that we would not have any more visitors in our compartment. It was getting rather late in the night and we were thinking that very few people would be getting onto a train at this hour. Of course we were wrong.

A young gentleman fresh from hiking entered into the cabin. He proceeded to stash his gear, close the compartment door and then remove his hiking boots. The stench was overpowering and I started to gag. I immediately rolled down the window, claiming that I thought the compartment was rather warm. I curled up in the corner, as far away from the stinky feet as I could manage, with my blanket over my head to try and mute the smell.

From the position in the corner I was shaken awake by my aunt. I realized that I was soaking wet. During my nap it had started raining outside and the window was stuck open. The way the wind was blowing and the direction that the train was traveling combined so that all of the water that came in through the window landed on me. I crawled over to the other side of the cabin and went back to sleep.

When Jennifer woke me again she was in a panic. We were still in the train, but our watches were telling us that we should have been in Prague an hour ago. Jennifer went to find a conductor to see if we had passed Prague already. He said we had, giving us quite a scare. We set about frantically trying to figure out where we were when another passenger informed us that Prague was actually the last stop on the line and we had not yet passed it.

We settled back into our compartment and anxiously waited to see who would be right, the passenger or the conductor. The passenger was right and we arrived in Prague utterly exhausted. By this time though we no longer had two full days to spend exploring Prague; we had thirty-six hours.