I love to ride my bicycle, I love to ride my bike,
I love to ride my bicycle, I love to ride it where I like . . .
It’s been an interesting transition again to a life without cars for a small-town car addict like me. The children are becoming adept at deciphering the maps describing public transportation routes and jumping on and off of subways, trams, buses, and trains.
And we’ve become the proud owners of five flea-market bikes in varying stages of age and repair. Hannes and Lara have some hot 15-gear mountain bikes, Anna’s is a three-speed pink and teal beauty, mine is a good sturdy city vehicle, and Jost's--well, Jost's is a piece of junk. Fortunately, Jost is an experienced bike mechanic who’s passing his wisdom down to Hannes, and they’ve become a familiar sight down in the central courtyard of our building with an overturned bike between them.
The bikes have liberated us from the miles we walked during our first two weeks in the city. It’s amazing how effortlessly we can cover those same miles from atop a bike. But it’s also added a new anxiety to my life as I watch my children negotiating the roads with German car drivers. There are fewer bike lanes than we had in Hamburg, and too often we have to share the streets. Anna is still allowed to ride on the sidewalk, but the older kids are consigned to traffic.
Still, there are many beautiful—and safer—places to ride in Berlin. Not far from our apartment is the huge city park in the center of Berlin with miles of broad, pea-gravel paths beneath shade trees and alongside canals and ponds. For several kilometers it borders the city zoo, so as we ride we smell the elephants and see the ostriches and flamingoes on the other side of the fence. We’ve also discovered the “gardens” behind the Charlottenburg Castle near our home, extensive paths that go through amazingly overgrown greenery that makes me feel like I’m riding somewhere along Smith River!
The weather has turned suddenly fall-like in the last few days. Stay tuned to see how bike riding goes as we approach a continental winter!
