Last night I picked a fight with Mother Nature, I almost lost the battle, so today I’m very grateful to be able to write this blog and share my experience.
To give you a bit of background, as most of you know I recently celebrated my birthday which means I am slowly but surely getting older, although I’m still looking damn good for my age. The other day I suddenly felt the urge to revive my youth. I suppose you can call it a quarter life crisis or something, I know there are a few of you that knows exactly what I’m talking about because you are experiencing the same thing, but the odds are that you would pretend that you don’t know what it’s about purely because you are in what they call denial. But that is a topic for another blog.
So I felt rebellious yesterday and decided to saddle up the old motorcycle (yip it’s the one in the picture on the right side of my blog), I haven’t had the wind blowing through my hair for a while since I was a varsity student, so I was really excited. I got home yesterday afternoon parked my car and said goodnight to it, quickly changed into proper riding gear (t-shirt, shorts and sandals), grabbed my gym bag, kick started the bike put on my helmet (the one without the visor….nothing an old pair of swimming goggles can’t fix!) and off I went.
After making a few stops along the way, and having dinner at my usual diner (thanks mom!), I finally arrived at gym at about 19:00pm. Parking was no problem of coarse I just parked in front of the entrance. I did my usual routine in the pool and got dressed. As I walked towards the exit I heard a noise on the roof of the gym! ……. At 16:00pm that afternoon it was 37’C and not a cloud in the sky….no need to take a jacket……., now the picture slightly changed…..it was pouring down! Remember I live about 8km away from the gym.
Plan A was to wait a while for the storm to quiet down. Because of my patient nature I couldn’t stare at other people trying to improve their looks for too long, and convinced myself that the storm has calmed down and that it was time to move on to plan B. So I saddled up again started up the machine and the ride of a lifetime began!
I quickly realised that the swimming goggles were not going to work as well as they did earlier, they fogged up so quickly, and after I almost took out an entire Chinese family in the parking area, I had to get rid of them (that’s the goggles I mean not the family). My first thought was to get this trip over as quickly as possible so I went full throttle, but I never realised that those sweet little raindrops falling on one’s head turn into vicious little fuckers at 80km/h! So I obviously had to slow down a bit.
Mense ek was deur diep waters! Literally!!! Hans Strijdom transformed into a river that would make the mighty Vaal look like a walk in the park! You remember the Garsfontein/Rubenstein crossing?? I hope you do because it’s not there anymore!!! The most fun of it all was when a Putco bus came past me as I was driving through a big puddle, 90% of the puddle landed on me! I wanted to cry, but what’s the use, no-one would notice as the kamikaze raindrops hit my cheeks at excessive speed and would just wash my tears away in any case!
The last time that I was so glad to see the entrance to Mooikloof Ridge appearing over the horizon was…….mmm…..no I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited before! I made it home! Luckily the feeling in my fingers came back during the night otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to share this with all of you, see there is always a bright side…something to be grateful for.
To give you a bit of background, as most of you know I recently celebrated my birthday which means I am slowly but surely getting older, although I’m still looking damn good for my age. The other day I suddenly felt the urge to revive my youth. I suppose you can call it a quarter life crisis or something, I know there are a few of you that knows exactly what I’m talking about because you are experiencing the same thing, but the odds are that you would pretend that you don’t know what it’s about purely because you are in what they call denial. But that is a topic for another blog.
So I felt rebellious yesterday and decided to saddle up the old motorcycle (yip it’s the one in the picture on the right side of my blog), I haven’t had the wind blowing through my hair for a while since I was a varsity student, so I was really excited. I got home yesterday afternoon parked my car and said goodnight to it, quickly changed into proper riding gear (t-shirt, shorts and sandals), grabbed my gym bag, kick started the bike put on my helmet (the one without the visor….nothing an old pair of swimming goggles can’t fix!) and off I went.
After making a few stops along the way, and having dinner at my usual diner (thanks mom!), I finally arrived at gym at about 19:00pm. Parking was no problem of coarse I just parked in front of the entrance. I did my usual routine in the pool and got dressed. As I walked towards the exit I heard a noise on the roof of the gym! ……. At 16:00pm that afternoon it was 37’C and not a cloud in the sky….no need to take a jacket……., now the picture slightly changed…..it was pouring down! Remember I live about 8km away from the gym.
Plan A was to wait a while for the storm to quiet down. Because of my patient nature I couldn’t stare at other people trying to improve their looks for too long, and convinced myself that the storm has calmed down and that it was time to move on to plan B. So I saddled up again started up the machine and the ride of a lifetime began!
I quickly realised that the swimming goggles were not going to work as well as they did earlier, they fogged up so quickly, and after I almost took out an entire Chinese family in the parking area, I had to get rid of them (that’s the goggles I mean not the family). My first thought was to get this trip over as quickly as possible so I went full throttle, but I never realised that those sweet little raindrops falling on one’s head turn into vicious little fuckers at 80km/h! So I obviously had to slow down a bit.
Mense ek was deur diep waters! Literally!!! Hans Strijdom transformed into a river that would make the mighty Vaal look like a walk in the park! You remember the Garsfontein/Rubenstein crossing?? I hope you do because it’s not there anymore!!! The most fun of it all was when a Putco bus came past me as I was driving through a big puddle, 90% of the puddle landed on me! I wanted to cry, but what’s the use, no-one would notice as the kamikaze raindrops hit my cheeks at excessive speed and would just wash my tears away in any case!
The last time that I was so glad to see the entrance to Mooikloof Ridge appearing over the horizon was…….mmm…..no I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited before! I made it home! Luckily the feeling in my fingers came back during the night otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to share this with all of you, see there is always a bright side…something to be grateful for.
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