Further cycling action

I went for another cycle today. The overall process went quite well, in that I got to grips with the whole cycling on the wrong side of the road thing, plus the giving way to merging traffic from the right in small villages thing, but my confidence was perhaps an error now I look back on the whole affair.

My approach to cycling in places I’ve never been before is much the same as my approach to walking in places I’ve never been before, i.e. set off with no specific goal in mind and wander aimlessly for a while. On foot this is a fairly safe approach as you can’t really get too far away from your starting location, but when transporting oneself at high speed on a veritable locomotion of a vessel, the whole process becomes slightly riskier, if you hope to make it back to the place you started from. Which is fairly important if you are in a foreign country whose language you do not speak, with no means of communicating because you do not have any mobile technology, nor in fact any real idea where you live.

Anyway, after some fascinating detours around a variety of exciting housing estates (which I can report, are about as exciting as housing estates elsewhere in the world - I am becoming quite the housing estate connoisseur, the ones in Sydney en route to Bondi are particularly fine), the realisation that heading towards the autobahn is not the greatest idea in the world, and some orienteering using the sun, plus some not entirely legal roundabout manoeuvres (you go round them anti-clockwise over here it turns out), I did in fact make it back home. I know, I’m as relieved as you are. In fact, I suspect, more so.

I have learnt some other things today. I wasn’t supporting North Korea, but they still managed to lose fairly spectacularly against Portugal. Roger Federer nearly made it out of Wimbledon in the first round, but then won back. And some chap in Germany threw a puppy at some bikers before escaping on a bulldozer he had stolen. To be fair, he did abandon the bulldozer and hitchhike the remainder of the way home. The puppy was fine. No word on how the bikers managed.

Finally, I have given in and embraced the world of Twitter. If that is your sort of thing, you can keep up with a shortened version of my ramblings there. Plus my blog posts will be tweeted there too, due to the magic of interconnectedness that is the internet. Who needs decent content when we have so many platforms to play with! It’s @Lozula if you have a desire to see what happens there. I cannot promise you magic.