Bikes and Bulls

Can it be? It has been over a week since the last Franch tale! I had better put one up so my trusty readers won't desert me. Jenni and Danny, I am lookin' out for you!

Growing up, we loved to go bike riding. I will never forget our first bike. It was a little black Huffy, purchased if my memory serves me well at Target. Dad took it home and assembled it for us. It was the beginning of a lot of fun times. Somewhere along the line, we acquired a red bike of some sort. I also got a lavender bike for Christmas one year, which I contributed my measly savings of probably $2.46. (Hey, that’s like a summer’s worth of pop can collecting!) We would ride up and down the sidewalk and as we got older we would venture down the road. It wasn’t long before we were riding down the dirt road to the ‘big hills.’ These hills were, to use modern day vernacular, ‘the bomb.’ The first hill was steep enough that even if you went down it riding your brakes, you could still have enough momentum to rocket up the next hill. It was a sign of getting older and braver when we went down that hill for the first time. Remember, Rach? I also remember going down those hills on the back of the snowmobile with John Folkestad. He flew down the hill with me flapping off the back like a flag in the wind. When he went over an irrigation ditch, I flew off. Good times, people. I just wonder how I lived to tell about it. Which leads me, in a very roundabout way, to the point of this Franch tale. On the way to the ‘big hills,’ there was a pen with several of the biggest, meanest, ugliest bulls around. They would stomp and snort and stare us down as we passed them by. Now these bulls would be enough to scare the pants off of just about anyone. What made it even worse was the fact that these lean, mean, kid-eating machines were held captive by two measly strands of hot wire. Only two strands. We would push our bikes up the hill as fast as we could. As soon as we got to the top of the hill, exactly where it always seemed the bulls would be standing to stare us down, we would jump on our bikes and fly down as fast as we could. We weren’t going to waste any time finding out whether or not two strands of hot wire could hold in a 2000 pound bull. We’d haul down that dirt road faster than two shakes of a lamb’s tail and wouldn’t slow down till we were well past range to avoid a situation like this:

P.S. The caption on this photo when I found it online was 'Cheeky Bull.' Te, he, he, he....