We Do Adventure

I learnt some new vocabulary today. That’s not unusual. We’re learning things all the time. Mondays and Thursdays are the days we usually have language lessons so, this being a Monday, it’s particularly not unusual – if that makes sense! What is unusual is the some of the words we learned. We keen to learn relevant language; words and phrases we’ll actually use. When we have to do exercises it’s good to do them around things we really do rather than hypothetical situations. For example, in today’s lesson we had to make a sentence starting “in my opinion...” Well, in my opinion it’s easier to ride up a mountain than down one. The speed and possibilities of grisly crashes make down a much more tense experience. (Tense is not helpful to smooth riding!) Explaining all this I went not to recount the fact that I turned round during this afternoon’s ride up a mountain road after hearing two very distinct gunshots! The shots seemed reasonably close and as I was further up than I’d been before ...

If I say ‘eating problems’ you’re probably already thinking about not-eating or over-eating or allergies. My problem, if that’s what it really is, is none of the above. It is that I have a bad habit of scoffing my food too quickly. I’ll often catch myself and make some annoyed-sounding noise through an unfinished mouthful. Tonight, as we had dinner with a friend who’s about to embark on a short trip to Scotland, I managed to pace myself. Slightly different from this morning when I bit of more than I could chew – although, admittedly, only metaphorically. It was a fine morning for mountain biking and I set my sights on the somewhere near the top of one of the mountains around Mostar. As I’ve yet to find a detailed local road map I consulted Google maps to check my options. Even here you have to use the satellite view as they’ve only mapped the one big road through Mostar. There is, however, enough zoom on their images for confident route planning. The terrain view told me I was planning...