On Monday, August 15, we rode downtown on two of the four bicycles stored in the shed behind this house my sister is watching during its owner's vacation. The bikes are heavy three speeds with coaster brakes, but they're bikes, and that's enough for me.
We got to downtown Neugraben, two kilometres away, locked the bikes to a bike stand, one of many in this land of many bikes, and bought no ordinary hot dogs from a kiosk in the big grocery store. For 1.20 Euros, one gets a boiled wiener bigger than in Canada, a wiener that sticks a few centimetres out each end of its bun. It's like a cartoon hot dog.
Dogs eaten on a street bench outside, we went grocery shopping, cloth bags in hand. Groceries later in the bags on a table outside a nearby bakery, my sister had coffee and I had a Danish-shaped, glazed bun with walnut pieces on it.
Groceries in their bags in the big baskets on the front of the bikes, we rode back to the house.
While my sister unpacked the grub, I loaded into a bike basket the 20-odd wine and beer bottles that were here when the homeowner left. I rode a kilometre or so to the recycle bin I saw near the graveyard yesterday. Tombstone and flower sellers are nearby, and a couple blocks away is a home business making tombstones, a dozen or so on display in the front yard. "Great place on Halloween," she said yesterday.
Still physically fit, years before I'm recycled to dust, I want to ride this bicycle again today, in no particular direction. "Not all who wander are lost," J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. I will soon ride toward the graveyard, which on a bushy hillside, and ride on some of the forest paths beyond. This is not the Great Beyond, but it is a great beyond.
Long live the bicycle.
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