Ailment # 5562...this poor vessel(Megan)

Yesterday Corey and I decided that it would be a great idea to rent bicycles and find out a little more about Pai (mountain town on the north of Thailand, near Myanmar). It started out like any other bike ride…cows of all shapes and sizes and smells, a wat (temple) with a drunk Thai man and a monk giving us sign-language interpretations of the story of the Buddha with the hollow steaming water head…you know, the usual. After breaking a sweat heading up to the mountains we were relieved to realize that the New Year celebration starts early here. For us, it meant getting soaked with buckets of water and having a flour-water mixture wiped on our faces about every 100 feet. The kids absolutely love this holiday, and who wouldn’t…it’s a nation-wide water fight! The bike continued high up into the mountains until we finally reached the waterfall. It was one of those amazing waterfalls with many tiers, allowing you to slide down into a pool of water. So amazing. On the way back down from the waterfall we felt elated and were enjoying the ease of the descent and praising ourselves for coming up the steep mountain. I was being silly and telling Corey about a dragonfly I had just seen face-planted into the ground when I slid forward on the bike seat. I tried to brake, but the quality of the Thai bicycles are not quite the same…brakes were bad and the bike weighed almost nothing. The brakes slammed and I went straight over the front of the handle bars, the bike coming up behind me and flipping over my head. I found myself in quite a state of pain…shoulder and elbow bleeding and pounding, legs and knee and hip scraped all up, and a huge purple palm with a throbbing wrist to match. Corey was there to join me in a rant about the quality of bike and how surely I was not the clumsy one…starting to think that all of the scars I am acquiring tell a different story. Wow, get me the hell down the mountain. Meanwhile, the kids are still there to soak us with water, which now makes my wounds sting like an iron. Still, at least we were biking by a field of sunflowers and Corey immediately gave me a cold beer to settle the score