What a gray day. I'm glad yesterday was an active one. B and I got up late in the morning, had some breakfast and went to check out the SSME Coaster Derby. Teams get together and build adult versions of the boxcar: no engine, metal frame, few restrictions (car + driver < 600lbs). If you've ever been to Fredericton, you know the university is built on a fairly significant hill. The derby course runs down the road on one side of the university, with nothing but a few tires keeping the drivers from crashing into some painful objects. It was a fairly eventful morning with free food, a dj pumping random music outdoors, and a few crashes. After a few practice runs, the teams began the individual time trials. Now maybe it's just opinion, but so far many have agreed, standing right behind a waist high wall of tires with a 500-600lb object flying towards you is not the best idea. It seems not everyone has this much common sense. A few dads chose to stand behind one such wall of tires because it provided such a great viewpoint. Well, one driver didn't quite make the corner and flew straight into that tire wall; dads and kids went flying through the air. We found out later that dads and kids went flying through the air because they dove out of the way, and luckily not because they were thrown as it had first appeared. We left shortly after, just as they were starting to run two cars at a time...I can only imagine the carnage that insued. This was by the way, the 30th anniversary of the Coaster Derby, so I don't imagine the safety risks will put a damper on things.

Yesterday afternoon, B and I went on a little adventure to the wood lot. Just getting there was most of the adventure, first I wasn't allowed to go into the woods before I could ride over the curb, and immediately down a wet grassy hill into a ditch before the woods. Being the chicken that I am, this took forever. I eventually got both tires over the curb, but there was no way I was continueing down the hill...I don't like slimey wet hills, I also don't like going down a hill on which I have to stop in the next five feet. Yes, I am aware that I need to work on this. What came next was far more amusing. Rather than heading straight into the woods where we were, we decided to navigate around a large puddle, into the woodlot. Others had obviously made it around before, as on the edges of the large puddle, there were smaller puddles in the brush with planks laid across them. B went across the first plank fine, then went he came to the second puddle, there were planks there, but they were insufficient. He laid his bike down and decided to try and make it better. I turned around for just a minute, and heard a huge splash! Looking back, there was B, dripping from the waist down...how he managed it, I don't know, the puddle was only a foot deep. Now that he was soaked he didn't care how wet he got, so he went and found some rocks and strategically placed them in the second puddle so that I could carry my bike across it. First I had to get across the first, which I accomplished a little less gracefully than B had. He caught me as I was slipping off the plank on the edge of the puddle, I ended up with one wet foot...not bad. Now that we finally made it into the woodlot, we followed the main path, looking for the trail we had taken the last time. Turns out we took a wrong turn, and were definitely not heading in the same direction. The path we took led us to this huge sandy, gravely deposit, like a big hill in a clearing. We will definitely go back, if we can find it again...I wish I had my camera or my sketch book. We spent a half hour there playing on the slopes before heading back for supper.