Days 5 and 6

Having upgraded my browser, several places ceased and desisted, one of them being this one, but we are now back on track.



Apparently Adrián is training several people who are planning on entering a triathalon--running, swimming, and bicycling in a single event. One of the people is Hernán, my informal son who used to come to the house when he was a mere teenager of 14 or 15 and eat all the hotdogs I had in the fridge, making me wonder if he was being fed at home. He also went with us to Austin and entered the half marathon with Rodrigo, back in February.



These things are killers. I'm not sure in what order the torture occurs, but I think first is some kind of ghastly footrace, followed by a long swim, and topped with a bike race. T had several special bike stands lined up on our corner of the park, and the future sufferers placed their bikes on the stand (making them stationary bikes) and then rode hell for leather to, well, nowhere. Hernán got to ride on the street, but he later commented that his heart was in his throat the whole time.



And he has a point. Drivers here come in two versions: predatory or lobotomized. Either one can kill you, one type on purpose and the other because it can barely grasp the concept of lanes and turn signals. Monterrey has absolutely no pedestrian culture whatsoever--there are no bike lanes that are safe, there are huge expanses of pavement where no pedestrian facilities exist. I refer to things as basic as sidewalks. There are elevated crosswalks over major traffic arteries, but they are few and far between. I'm not saying the pedestrians aren't bordering on idiocy as well, since I've seen women carrying small children cross six lanes of whizzing traffic, climbing over the cement divider on the median, with an elevated pedestrian crossing within 20 yards of where they are.





Our mayor has decided to establish bike lanes on a permanent basis, some of which will be exclusively for bikes and not shared with traffic; others will be painted in alongside ordinary traffic, and good luck on that one. There the problem is not the bike lanes but the drivers--you can't share anything with the kinds of drivers we have here and expect to live.

I'm not worried about Hernán, however; every time he's gone out, his bike has had a flat tire. Oh, yeah, he knows how to fix that little problem now, but it gives him a few moments of safety as he gets up onto a sidewalk to work on it. Apparently he and my son Rodrigo, also plagued with flat bike tires, are going to drive way the heck over to the other side of town to ride in a huge park that has traffic-less bike lanes. It warms my heart to know that all those thumb tacks I scattered around the boys' bike lanes have done their job!