On a Roll...

Interestingly, after yesterday’s post where I mentioned that I had been thinking about a road bike and then, BOOM, a guy showed up offering me one, I’ve received several messages and emails about it.  Some have wondered if it might not have been God providing a bike for me.  Believe me, I definitely thought of that.  A lot.  It was an older bike and, although it looked like it was in good condition, – as much as I could tell from where I was – there are just too many things that I wouldn’t be able to adequately check on it, like chain wear.

Me?  I chose to look at it as an opportunity to differentiate between a need and a want.  Sure, I probably could have come up with the 6000 Lempiras the guy wanted, or talked him down a little, but, honestly, do I really *need* two bikes here?  I think not.

OK, on to my story about the two drunks:

I wanted to get some extra miles yesterday and even a little extra work on the hills, so I decided to head back up toward the Volcán for a second time.  I was not planning to go up very far, but just get some extra mileage.

I was not too far off the boulevard, not quite up to the cemetery yet, when I noticed that all the cars in front of me were stopped, and one of them appeared to be blocking the road.  “Oh, great!” I thought.  “I’ve run into a political protest or something.” I quickly scanned the road to see where I could bail out, but there was nowhere.  I kept riding closer since the cars were actually getting through, albeit slowly.  That’s when I saw it:  two guys on the ground in the middle of the street, throwing punches at each other.

Seriously.  I saw two guys rolling around in the middle of the road slugging it out.  Then, they both got up and one picked up a rock and threw it at the other one, letting out a string of obscenities along with the boulder.  He seemed to have a pretty good arm, but kept missing the other guy, who, as you might imagine, was also throwing rocks at his attacker.

Now, these weren’t just little stones.  They were big.  Huge!  I’m talking baseball- to softball-sized rocks, and there appeared to be no shortage of them.  Remember, I’m still riding forward while all this is happening.  By now, I’m riding as far to the right side of the road as possible and trying to dodge the rocks as they roll toward me.  One actually hit my front wheel, but glanced off of it.

As soon as I could, I picked up the pace and cleared the area.  So did all the cars that had been in line.  One car in front of me, once clear of the melee, started telling cars traveling in the opposite direction, those headed directly toward it, what was going on.  After about three blocks or so, that car pulled off to the side of the road.  I decided to go up and talk to the driver for a minute.

The woman driving still had her window down, so as I got closer, I called out a friendly greeting so that I didn’t startle her.  I told her that I had never seen anything like that here and asked her if it happens a lot.  She told me that, no, it was very, very rare, but the two guys were both drunk – which was pretty obvious.  She said that she just wanted to make sure that the people driving toward it didn’t get their  cars damaged by the rocks.

After that exchange, I continued on, riding a little bit further than I had planned to since I wanted to give both guys plenty of time to cool down and hopefully be gone on my return trip.  By the time I turned around and started back to town, the fight was just a distant memory, with only rocks and bags of trash marking the scene.  I even figured out the probable cause of the fight: a turf war.  Over garbage.  At the corner nearest the fight, there were lots of bags of trash and the guy who first started throwing the rocks was happily going through the trash, looking for treasure.  My guess is that the second guy stumbled upon, literally, all the trash and thought *he* would pick through it.  That turned out to be the wrong thought.

Looks like there really is never a dull day around here – on or off the bike!