Adventures in Paris

For those of you who have travelled often you know that some crazy stuff is bound to happen. If only we had known what great adventures lay before us. This is us trapped in an elevator. We were stranded for about 45 minutes. I was loving of it, but some people weren't so much. Greg was definitely not worried, but you wouldn't know it from this picture. And just a word of warning, when a French elevator says weight limit 7 people, 8 people will definitely break it.
This is us (L to R: Jeremy, me, Kelly, Dan) getting ready for a nice leisurely bike ride. On Friday nights in Paris there is a huge bike ride where people meet at this famous hotel and all ride together and police block of all the traffic in all the intersections. The group rides to the Eiffel Tower, takes a 15 minute snack break then comes back to the hotel. Only we were about 3 minutes late for the meeting.......

I've got to be honest I was kinda anxious about not being able to stay with the group. I really didn't want to be riding through the streets without the police escort, especially the way many people drive in Europe. But since the 10 of us from our group were late we didn't really have a choice. Fortunately we had a local worker with us who knew the side streets and could help us catch up the group......
Well believe it or not, we never saw the main group again, but the ride to try to catch them was definitely the funnest bike ride of my life. In trying to catch up with the group we had to take a bunch of sidestreets, but as we got close to the Eiffel Tower then the fun began. The only way to cut across to the Eiffel Tower was to weave between oncoming traffic through 5-6 lines of traffic to cross four or five different streets. So we're crossing the streets and all the girls are screaming bloody murder and I'm laughing my head off cause I've never had so much fun. It was definitely like the old school Nintendo game Paperboy except in the game if you got hit by a car you just had to start over. Unfortunately no one was able to take any pictures while we were dodging cars, but here is a picture of me and Kelly after we crossed one of the streets. And can my boy Greg overexaggerate an injury or what. Dude stepped in this little 4 inch hole and started rolling on the ground like he just got shot in the face. A lot of people actually thought he was playing charades. This is a picture of some volunteer paramedics strapping him into a collapse-able wheelchair. I think he was just faking it to get out of housework once we got home, but he definitely had to play up it to keep the fib going.

Ok, the truth is he already had a sprained ankle and the injury was pretty minor. But because he was rolling on the ground due to the intial pain some people overreacted and got to the paramedics. Then he had to spend the next 5-6 hours getting his ankle poked at by everyone in Paris would had ever considered being a doctor, nurse, EMT, trainer, bank teller, etc. Needless to say, it was a pretty funny situation considering he was only mildly injured.