Boarding and Biking, Part I

I’ve mixed biking and snowboarding five times in my life. Once in France, where after snowboarding all morning on the glacier at the top of the mountain, a group of us rented mountain bikes and biked from the middle of the mountain to the bottom. Well, the others biked. I mostly fell…on…every…single…turn. The next day, I looked like I had fallen into a Willy Wonka factory machine, the one that makes Scrumptelicious Blueberry-Raspberry Delight.

The 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th times were all in the Netherlands. The 2nd time was when I biked from my flat to snowboard on the indoor conveyer belt (see earlier post). The 3rd and 4th times were when I biked from my flat to Snowplanet, which is the closet indoor snowboarding hill to Amsterdam. Even though it’s the closest, it’s still 2 ½ hours away by bike. Luckily, the bike ride is mostly pleasant. The path is one that a lot of people take when they are biking to Haarlem. Also, after snowboarding, we only had to bike a half hour from the hill to the train station and take the train back to Amsterdam.

The best thing about Snowplanet is the barbeque they have in the summer. If you get a combo-ticket, it only costs 12 euro. They prepare a generous assortment of meats for you, and you grill it yourself. They also bring you bread, fries, a mixed salad, potato salad, and cole slaw. It’s a real feast. It would almost be worth the drive even without the snowboarding thrown in.

Otherwise, it’s a lame little hill. In my opinion, not even that good for teaching beginners. The conditions are what we in Tahoe would have called ‘dust on crust’. Here it’s even more apt, because the indoor places have sawdust-y snow. Underneath it is – I’m guessing -- either ice or concrete. The temperature is colder than most people expect. They keep it below freezing (-5 or -6 degrees Celcius). There’s no music playing, and they haven’t bothered to do much with the walls and ceilings. So you don’t have the feeling that you are in anything other than a big rectangular freezer.

In the summer, there’s a “fun” park in the middle with 3 or 4 rails and boxes. Useless to me, since I made a promise to myself to stay away from metal a few years ago. Being older now and working in a corporate environment, where I almost already have to whisper that I’m a snowboarder (versus being a skier, which is somehow considered as respectable as playing golf or tennis among upper management – it implies not only that you are strong and athletic, but also that you are an aggressive and powerful risk-taker; it does not imply that you are juvenile, reckless, and arrogant! But okay -- I won’t continue further along this slightly-bitter riff for the moment). In short, I feel as though I can no longer risk coming to work with black eye or a broken tooth.

My reservations about jibbing have not extended to jumping though. That’s something that I can’t give up just yet. Unfortunately, Snowplanet has just three jumps. A small one at the top, which is always un-jumpable because the landing is so icy. A giant one in the middle, which has a gap you could drive a car through and is obviously designed with competitive snowboarders and skiers in mind, and a medium-sized one at the very bottom, which theoretically I could jump, if only I could get enough damned speed. The only way to do that, apparently, is to either attach an engine to my board or jump the giant gap in the middle first, which generates just enough speed to do a pop off the bottom jump.

But I must continue this later this week, as I see now that it is 3:52am, and I shouldn’t continue to indulge my insomnia this way. I’m not sure I can blame it on jet lag anymore, since I came back from the U.S. on Wednesday. It won’t be easy getting Ambien on short notice, because I still haven’t signed up for a GP in Holland. I slept great over the weekend – 9 or 10 hours a night, both nights. Ugh, what happened? Maybe I’ll pick up some espresso beans on the way to the office…