Best purchase I ever made

This weekend decided again for another physical adventure. 7 of us including one Timorese whom had never ridden a bike more than a mile were off to Maibissi for the night. The plan was to ride the 65km through the mountains back to Dili on Sunday. Being extremely intelligent about things I decide to drink a whole bottle of wine the night we stayed in maibissi during a intense game of Taboo, men vs women, which was dominated by men*.

*This was following the logical and moral score keeping of rob (picture 2), on the boys team, in which we removed the points posted Sarah, on the girls team, who is the game owner and therefore has home field advantage. In some cases it was even relevant to count her scores as negatives. I must state the boys had additional difficulties as all members were from different continents whereas the girl’s team was all Americans.

The next day we climbed aboard our amazing cheap Indonesian made Wal-Mart quality performance machines and set out on the road. Although the 65km is mostly a decent, which was the main motivation for the trip, there were some tough hills. The longest about 15km and quite steep. On one particular decent as I approached the group on the side of the road who were taking a break I thought of pulling a skid to scare them. I will later say I was trying a trick, but really who knows cause I have forgotten to be honest. I thought it was no biggie as I have done it close to 1 billion times as a kid on the dirt roads in Canoncito. Of course what I forgot was I had just tightened my brakes for the long decent and had switched right with left because I was having trouble with the back. So what happens when you slam on your front break at 20 km/hr.? I would love to say a flawless endow 360 or a seesaw flip but instead I went over the handle bars head first into the ground.

10 Timorese who were standing right there and would normally laugh at any painful occurrence were dead silent. I think they thought I died. Even I lay there a moment to make sure I had all my pieces. Yes I did. In fact, I ended up with only minor scratches and cuts. The one time use helmet I thought was a necessary purchase only the morning before was cracked and had probably saved me.

We climbed back on a finished the remainder of the ride and pulled into Dili about 2:30 a half hour before the cutoff for free sticky date putting from Castaways, a local treat promised to us by Rob if we arrived before 3. Took us just under 7 hrs. It was a sweet victory.