Roller Blading Sans Breaks...Times Two

Tuesday, July 3rd, 1400h
We left the lycee in the early afternoon to take approximately 25 or 26 girls roller blading and bike riding. After greatly annoying the man in the shop with such a throng of loudly screaming American girls, everyone took off along the promenade, some more successfully than others. For those of you who are not familiar with Nice, the boardwalk area around the beach is called the Promenade des Anglais and even to those of us who are familiar with the city, we were not aware that the Promenade has quite the incline. You tend not to notice these things when you are in flip flops. The girls all took off to the right of the rental shop. Being the wise woman that we are (read: seeing them catapult down the Promenade and hearing their shrieks), we started skating up the Promenade, to the left, on the way towards the port. It left us a bit breathless, but we were doing so well and it was such good excercise that Sara even felt compelled to say, "We should have a roller blading club every morning before class for the girls." And with that remark, the uphill turned into a downhill. We started to pick up speed and Sara, being the wiser of the two, crashed into the wall of the Promenade, overlooking a huge cliff. Lily continued to descend. Rapidly. Seeing how close Sara was to throwing herself off the cliff when she hit the wall, Lily decided this was not the best idea. A bit further down the Promenade, she tried to stop herself at a taller wall, but was going so fast that she missed it and just kept on going. At this point, Sara was still on the wall watching in amazement as Lily kept on going. While at first Lily thought it was slightly amusing and was laughing to herself, she soon realized the gravity of the situation. It went from a laughing-to-herself situation to an oh-shit-oh-shit-can't-stop situation. Lily saw that there was a parking lot to the right up ahead and thought that she could turn in there and decelerate on flat terrain. She was wrong. It was neither a parking lot nor flat terrain. It turned out to be a downward slope into the port that was protected by a parking beam. Scared that she was going headlong into the port, Lily had to throw herself onto the ground, right onto her tailbone (previously broken in 1999), skidding her bum as she came to a halting stop. Passersby looked astonished. Lily threw her hand up to Sara, who was a good half mile up the hill, to signal that she was alive, but she did not stand up. She could not move from her emergency crash landing. Lily finally stood up and turned to sit on the curb, hand down her pants trying to assess the damage to her tailbone.

All of a sudden, Lily sees Sara coming down the hill, trying to come down slowly. Sara's efforts were useless. She picked up speed like a little snowball going down a mountain. Lily was watching this in out-right horror. Sara's face was priceless: she was in pure shock, some EMTs would even call it a look of impending doom, and her arms were out to her sides as if grabbing onto the air would slow her down. As she was approaching Lily's landing site, she started to get more frantic. Ten yards away from where Lily was sitting were two metal poles, about 3 feet off the ground. We still don't know how she did it, but somehow Sara grabbed onto the pole and catapulted herself around it, slamming the left side of her body into the ground and banging her chin into the pole. Lily was laughing until she saw that Sara was not getting up. There was a couple standing over Sara who kept trying to get her up, but Sara resisted. In typical French fashion, the couple's final word on the matter was "Il ne faut pas rester ici!" -- translation: you musn't stay here.

We did not know whether to laugh or cry. We did not know how this happened to both of us. Seriously? Please keep in mind that we were sans helmets, pads, and, apparently, breaks. After sitting on the street for a good 15 minutes, we took off our roller blades, got up, and started hobbling up the hill in our socks, crying and swearing. Though we had only been on the skates for 5 minutes, it took us at least half an hour to reach the rental place. It seems that zipping down a hill on skates like a bat out of hell tends to make one go very very fast. We covered a lot of ground thanks to the lack of functional breaks. About 4 cop cars passed us hobbling in our socks on the walk back and none of them stopped for us, causing Sara to shriek obscenities at them. No one even asked if we were okay, which pissed us off even more. We dumped our skates with the asshole-of-a-rental guy who gave us breakless skates and crab walked our way back to the lycee. Overall, 5 minutes of skating cost us over an hour of painful walking, dirty socks, bruised egos, a nasty looking subdermal hematoma on Sara's left thigh, a contusion on her chin, a fractured tailbone for Lily, and scrapes where the bum meets the leg. Not to mention the fact that we are traumatized and will never let our future children roller skate. The cost-benefit analysis? So not worth it.