It's June of 2019. I've just turned 18, and I arrived in Paris about 48 hours ago. I'm sitting in the shade with two friends, staring hopelessly at the mangled bike tire splayed across the gas station parking lot like roadkill. Out of nowhere, the three of us, who certainly feel like roadkill in this historic heatwave, erupt into laughter over how bizarre we must look to passing pedestrians and Uber drivers. How the hell did I get here?
I'll back up a bit. Three years prior, in the spring of my sophomore year of high school, I was home sick from school with a migraine. I almost didn't pick up the FaceTime call from my Grandma Tina in my half-asleep state and horrible mood, but I knew that she and my Grandpa Dick had a long layover in Philadelphia on their way to some European country to do some European thing. I figured that despite leaving Cincinnati just that morning, they likely already had some wild travel story, so I answered the call anyway.
The person on the other line was not my five-foot-tall, gray-haired grandmother, nor was it my tanned and smiling grandfather in his Navy sweatshirt. This person had shiny curls and wass joined by a small group of people. All were teenage girls. I was fully awake now, and started flipping through all the worst-case scenarios in my mind. Without a doubt, my grandparents had been kidnapped or had gotten hurt or missed their flight and at least one of their cell phones was left behind in an East Coast airport. And then, Tina's face poked upside-down into a corner of my screen as she leaned over the top of the phone and yelled "WELL HIIIII!" into the speaker. The girls she was sitting with were laughing and waving at me. I was dumbfounded.
Tina explained to me between Internet connection interruptions that she had heard some girls my age speaking in both French and English, and, as she tends to do, approached them and started talking a mile a minute. She had already told them that her 15-year-old granddaughter was in her 4th year of language classes at school, and had already given them my address, and so I found myself chatting in broken French with these English learners. They were in America to compete in a figure skating competition and promised to write me a letter once they were home.
So, over the course of a few years, I got to know the curly-haired Elora and her teammate Ariane through bilingual writing and many printed photographs. Ariane and I would graduate high school in the same year, and in some stroke of luck, we convinced our families to let us make our own exchange program and visit each other. That's how I made my way to Ariane's home in Paris for two weeks in the summer before we began college.
On my second day there, Ariane and I rolled bikes out of her small backyard's shed and rode through her Parisian neighborhood to meet Elora. I was struggling along the way more than I'd like to admit. For as much bike-riding as I did back home, it was surprisingly difficult to adjust to riding on the narrow streets and dodge cars while I tried to acquaint myself with how the intersections worked. And then, within minutes, Ariane's tire deflated and the back wheel of her bike skidded to a dejected stop. I assumed this was our sign to take a break from the heat, but she wasn't concerned, and led us to a gas station nearby to pump more air into the tires.
The issue then was that none of the three of us really knew what we were doing, and these were old bikes. So maybe we shouldn't have been surprised when, after several minutes of air streaming through the rubber tube, that once pathetic but now rigid tire flew off its wheel. Merde! I mean, there's got to be a joke somewhere in there about how the French are filled with hot air.
So, that was how we ended up hunkered down in the shade on this 100ºF day, dreading the slow walk home after losing our wheels and our street cred. We were fueled back to Elora's apartment by dreams of grenadine syrup and laying on the floor next to the air conditioning. It may not sound glamorous, but not all of our French adventures can be! It was more than enough just to have a day out with two friends and no agenda.
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