The biggest thing we did for ourselves this past summer was to invest in some seriously cool bicycles. Mine was an anniversary gift from John and I have to say that this trumps pearls any day!
John has been taking his bike to work almost every day and we’ve gotten into the habit of taking them out when we go for brunch on the weekends or out to dinner at night. We’ve cycled over the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges to go visit Marcel in DUMBO and owning these bikes have really had such a positive impact on our lives over the past couple of months.
Dodging the yellow cabs and pedestrians in the city? Now that’s a whole different story!
Eri, John and Alice on their bikes
On Saturday we took our bikes on the train for the first time and headed out to New Jersey to go meet up with Eri and Alice (our US ‘mom’ and ‘dad’). Over the past two and a half years we’ve been out to their house plenty of times and the rule is always ‘Do whatever you want to entertain yourself’ – sometimes we’ve hung out at the pool, other times we’ve just had a BBQ on their lawn and on Saturday we decided to meet up with them and go for a long small town cycle.
This witch got her vacuum all tangled up!
We met Eri at the train station after a 40 minute train ride (and some hairy escalator ups and downs to navigate with the bicycles) and drove over to their place to meetup with Alice. After a long patio coffee catch-up, they took us on a tour of some typical small American towns with a local farmer’s market where the Halloween pumpkins were out in full force. Many of the houses already have their spider webs with jumbo creepy crawlies, witches, pumpkins and ghosts on display and I particularly loved this house where a witch had clearly lost her way and managed to navigate her vacuum cleaner into a tree!
Eventually we stopped for a lazy lunch and then it was back onto the train for the weary bikers. As we were saying our goodbyes Eri gave me a papa-bear hug and said, “I love you so very much”. For me, that took a really good day to the level of absolutely wonderful! And what’s not to love about that?