Continuing La Vie de Francais Conversion

Ah, I am still loving eating real food. It's interesting how a cracker with hydrogenated oil seems to leave a film on my tongue and how something with high fructose corn syrup tastes sickly sweet now after avoiding those things for a few weeks. I'm really enjoying pasta with cream sauce, bread with soft cheeses, potatoes with butter, and chocolate cake with ice cream. And, my waist is about an inch and a half smaller so that's a nice benefit.

Part of the French lifestyle is that for the most part they don't exercise. They are, however, very active walking places, usually taking the stairs and not an elevator and doing a lot of bike riding.

A couple years ago I wanted to start riding a bike more and even picked out one I wanted to buy, but at around $400 it was too expensive. And then my sister gave me her old bike which was better than my old bike so I got a basket for Oscar and started riding a bit. Happily Abby learned to ride her bike last year and so we rode to my parent's a few times.

But unfortunately, there are a lot of hills around here and some of them are really big. I rode my bike to work once and since the last quarter mile is about a 25% uphill climb, by the time I got here I was drenched in sweat and exhausted. Then of course, I only made it about 3/4 of the way home before dying and calling Kevin to come and pick me and the bike up.

Now yes, I know, if I kept riding as often as I could I would probably get so that the ride wasn't so difficult. But I'm really not interested in killing myself. So I mentioned to a friend a couple of weeks ago that I wished I could get a bike with a small motor JUST to help on hills. I'd still like to pedal them, but I'd rather they felt like small inclines instead of mountains that drenched me.

And he told me about a bike his dad got from Walmart that did exactly that! And Voila! I have a new bike! It is the coolest bike ever. It has 7 speeds and a small electric motor that uses a rechargable battery. I just got it on Saturday and was able to ride it some on Sunday and Monday and I absolutely love it! It's raining today, otherwise I would have rode it to work today. It EXACTLY makes big hills feel like small slopes and I can use just a little bit of throttle so that pedaling is much easier. I could make it do all the work if I wanted, but that's not what I'm after. I want to ride and be active, I just don't want to die doing it.

So hooray, here's my new bike: (I just need to get Kevin to weld me some geeky baskets for the sides of the back and get Oscar's basket on front and I will be tres francais! Except for the motor, but it's a small concession to get to ride whenever the weather permits! Also, black and pink are my favorite colors AND are the colors that my race car was so many years ago... but that's another story.