Why Bicycles are Better than Cars

On Monday morning I woke up to the noise of a lot of people chattering and moving about outside. I realised I must have overslept, and the fair – basically lots of local people offering their useless stuff for sale – had already started. I groaned and sat up to look at the clock, opposite my bed on a bookshelf. I stared at some amazement at it, then realised it had decided to stop making sense and perhaps applied a twenty hour a day time system, so I turned to the left, to look at my digital CD/radio clock near the window.
Sadly enough, this one displayed the exact same time, and although for a moment I did play with the thought of getting out of bed, starting up my pc and checking what time that would give me, I decided the chances of both my clocks, one digital and the other battery-run, malfunctioning at exactly the same time to exactly the same result, was practically nil. So I turned on to my other side and slept for over an hour before I woke up again at 7:15. The hubbub outside had only increased in volume, yet stubbornly I persisted in my dormant strategy. I got another hour of sleep before deciding I’d had enough and taking a shower.
As the fair was going on right in front of my window, which is on ground level, I decided to keep the curtains half closed so I would have some fragment of privacy left to me. Despite it only being about 8:30 then, there were quite a lot of visitors already. As I would be going on a cycling trip with some of my friends at 14:00, I had breakfast, made some preparations, cleaned up my room and had lunch. I then prepared two further sandwiches (in case I would get hungry on the road), prepared 3 bottles of water totalling 1,5 litres (taking the eventuality into account that other cyclists would have forgotten to bring along their own drink) and left at about 13:30. When I got outside the pandemonium of the situation became clear to me in all its grotesque misery: the vast majority of the eejits attending the fair had thought it necessary to go by car, despite the splendid weather and the fact that there are only about three narrow roads leading into Kanne and as many public parking spaces.
As I cycled to Maastricht, the entire road, from my house to the outskirts of the city, was absolutely crammed with cars in single line, standing motionless, waiting for someone to start moving, the air heavy and unstable from the exhaust fumes.
There were a number of fields, normally used for grazing cattle, now reserved for the iron horse, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough. All along the track, people on foot and on bicycle were trying to get to the small village, yet it was thanks to the lazy bastards in cars that their progress, too, was significantly hampered.
Sadly, the route that we would be cycling that day was also starting us off through Kanne; luckily, due to us deciding to go cross-country over the Sint Pieter, we avoided the vast mass of ignorant car-drivers and unfortunate pedestrians and cyclists. The trip from then on was fun, but tiring, as there were a few significant climbs and a beaming sun. Nevertheless, the weather was as good as we could have wished for, so it was a success in the end.