2006, Year 7

As it's been a while, I'm going to point you back to some of my other posts, especially in case you haven't read any of them thus far.  So, you can go to Year 6, Year 5 and Year 4.  Year 4 has the links to the prior years in it.

So, since I tortured poor K in my last post, I guess it's time to laugh at myself!!

Sometime in 2004 K finally got sick of listening to me talk about how much I loved Europe (I had been there twice) and said to me 'if you love it so much, why don't we just go!'  So, I spent the next year and a half saving money and planning a 3 week trip for just the 2 of us.  We did it in May/June 2006 as a graduation present to ourselves.  We both worked full time through college, and he graduated in 2005 and I did in 2006 (after 8 looooong years, but 3 degrees!).

We travelled all around while we were there.  I didn't know if I would ever get him to go back, so I wanted to try to take him to as many the places that I loved as possible, in hopes that he would also fall in love.  (he did - we can't wait to go back!).  We are big wine drinkers, so we hit the Champagne region, and one of their many wine regions. 

For the wine region, we went to the city of Dijon.  Yes, also known for their mustard!  We decided to rent bikes and ride through their 'rue de vin' (or whatever it was called) and find wineries to stop in and try wine, and buy what we wanted.

As a side note here, we had actually budgeted a decent amount of money for duties on bringing back wine, as if I remember correctly, between the 2 of us we only got like 3 bottles duty free, and we knew we wanted to bring back more than that.

So, we rode around and stopped at a few vineyards.  We were having a blast, tasting wines and picking some to bring home that were not sold in the states.  The last vineyard that we found was a little, out of the way, family run place.  It was actually really hard to find and we almost gave up.  I'm glad we didn't - the wine was AMAZING.  They didn't import to the US at all, so we brought home a number of their bottles.  The owner was super nice, and ended up giving us a ton of wine to taste/drink while we were there.  Which of course, by that point, we weren't spitting it out anymore, we were just enjoying.  So when we left and hopped on our bikes, we both realized that we had a buzz.

I promise we are not alcoholics, even though these 2 years involve drinking!!!

So, we are riding on our way back into Dijon, and we come into this little town with a town center.  We decide to stop here (I think maybe I had to pee or something?  I don't remember).  So, I pull into the town center (K is behind me) and they have these HUGE cement planters all around the square.  I decide, in my infinite drunken wisdom, that I can totally just come to a stop by plopping a foot down on one of these planters.

Can anyone see where this is leading?

I miss and my foot slides off.  Of course, I've got some moment from being on the bike, so my leg slides all the way down the planter (owie) and I go flying off the bike to land in a pile of Emms next to the planter, with the bike a few feet away. 

Oops.

Luckily no wine bottles in my backpack break, but the cement burn down my skin was nasty, and bleeding like a son of a b****.  We have nothing to staunch to blood, so it just keeps running, not trickling, down my leg into my sock.  Awesome.  Of course, since I've been drinking, and the cut is on the bone, it's bleeding worse then it probably would have normally.  I might've cried a little, I'm not really sure.

But I sit up and turn around to find K laughing hysterically at my plight, and some townspeople staring at us both like we've gone mad.

Nice.

I have a scar from that time, and the story that goes with it makes me laugh every time I tell it.