A little background information:
I graduated college in May and as a present to myself I went to Europe. I went to London, Barcelona, Rome and was supposed to continue the trip by going to Bologna, Modena, Milan, Berlin, and Dublin. Here is the story as to how my trip got cut short. It's a little long but it was requested by some friends to have all the details 🙂. The post will be updated once I write everything out.
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I always heard, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". Sounds good to me. In that case, we're renting scooters. A good plan, I thought. Our hostel was out of the city center and we intended on getting back and forth with scooters. We got to Rome in the morning, our Hostel was a piece of s*** (London/Barcelona were sweet), and we had trouble finding a replacement. I eventually found a guy that had some scooters available and we headed over there. He asked if we had any experience on bikes/scooters and I said, "kind of." Therein lied my first mistake. Apparently this guy read "kind of" as "no experience whatsoever and I'll probably crash whatever scooter you wind up giving me" ... smart guy. He gives me the biggest piece of s*** he had. I'll go over some of the problems:
1) It started ... sometimes
2) It died when it came to a stop
3) The brakes worked very poorly
4) It was slow
5) It didn't turn well
6) The speedometer/odometer didn't work
7) It looked like it survived the Blitzkrieg over London
Good start. We then try to find our hostel - for four hours. We had to eventually stop at an internet cafe for directions. For a 22km drive, there were 35 different turns .. literally. We eventually find the place and go grab some dinner. After dinner my buddy goes first and I follow at a pretty good distance mainly because my scooter is having a bad case of "I'm a piece of s***." I stay on the right side of the road as to allow traffic to pass me and that's when I see (now mind you it's 1:00 am and thus dark, did I mention the headlight wasn't so great?) a rather large pothole. Unfortunately I can't avoid it. I try slamming on the brakes but, as mentioned, they don't work too well. I hit the pothole and right after it was a larger second one. I hit the second one and crash. I think I stuck my right leg out to balance/catch myself but I was going rather quickly. I wound up breaking 3 bones in my right ankle. I knew as soon as I landed it was broken, mainly because when I lifted my leg it just dangled there. I messed up my right arm a bit as well.
Thankfully there was a couple that stopped, otherwise I would have been screwed. This area was deserted and who knows how long it would have been until someone saw me. They didn't speak English but I was able to get "Ambulance" across to them. The girl couldn't even look at my leg. She would glance over and then hide her face, it was nasty. The ambulance came eventually and I got to the hospital. They took X-Rays, it hurt. They took blood. They took gravel out of my arm. But, the worst part of the night was the ortho guy coming over and saying, "I need to set it." Mind you, no pain meds. He precedes to manhandle my ankle with some rather interesting crunching sounds throughout. That was by far the most painful experience of my life. More X-Rays, still messed up. This time he tells me he needs to knock me out for this last set, thank you Jesus.
But, I have to wait 3 hours because I had eaten dinner (I can't get knocked out), without any type of pain med. Eventually they take me into this room. There's a table next to me with some type of medieval-metal-torture-looking device and a drill, SWEET. I try asking them what that thing is for and they're like "surgery." As far as I knew the surgery wasn't for a few days but at this point I could give two s***, just knock me out PLEASE.
I wake up the next morning with a bolt through my heel, attached to the torture device with a weight, yes, a weight, attached to the bolt.
More to come 🙂
I graduated college in May and as a present to myself I went to Europe. I went to London, Barcelona, Rome and was supposed to continue the trip by going to Bologna, Modena, Milan, Berlin, and Dublin. Here is the story as to how my trip got cut short. It's a little long but it was requested by some friends to have all the details 🙂. The post will be updated once I write everything out.
----------
I always heard, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". Sounds good to me. In that case, we're renting scooters. A good plan, I thought. Our hostel was out of the city center and we intended on getting back and forth with scooters. We got to Rome in the morning, our Hostel was a piece of s*** (London/Barcelona were sweet), and we had trouble finding a replacement. I eventually found a guy that had some scooters available and we headed over there. He asked if we had any experience on bikes/scooters and I said, "kind of." Therein lied my first mistake. Apparently this guy read "kind of" as "no experience whatsoever and I'll probably crash whatever scooter you wind up giving me" ... smart guy. He gives me the biggest piece of s*** he had. I'll go over some of the problems:
1) It started ... sometimes
2) It died when it came to a stop
3) The brakes worked very poorly
4) It was slow
5) It didn't turn well
6) The speedometer/odometer didn't work
7) It looked like it survived the Blitzkrieg over London
Good start. We then try to find our hostel - for four hours. We had to eventually stop at an internet cafe for directions. For a 22km drive, there were 35 different turns .. literally. We eventually find the place and go grab some dinner. After dinner my buddy goes first and I follow at a pretty good distance mainly because my scooter is having a bad case of "I'm a piece of s***." I stay on the right side of the road as to allow traffic to pass me and that's when I see (now mind you it's 1:00 am and thus dark, did I mention the headlight wasn't so great?) a rather large pothole. Unfortunately I can't avoid it. I try slamming on the brakes but, as mentioned, they don't work too well. I hit the pothole and right after it was a larger second one. I hit the second one and crash. I think I stuck my right leg out to balance/catch myself but I was going rather quickly. I wound up breaking 3 bones in my right ankle. I knew as soon as I landed it was broken, mainly because when I lifted my leg it just dangled there. I messed up my right arm a bit as well.
Thankfully there was a couple that stopped, otherwise I would have been screwed. This area was deserted and who knows how long it would have been until someone saw me. They didn't speak English but I was able to get "Ambulance" across to them. The girl couldn't even look at my leg. She would glance over and then hide her face, it was nasty. The ambulance came eventually and I got to the hospital. They took X-Rays, it hurt. They took blood. They took gravel out of my arm. But, the worst part of the night was the ortho guy coming over and saying, "I need to set it." Mind you, no pain meds. He precedes to manhandle my ankle with some rather interesting crunching sounds throughout. That was by far the most painful experience of my life. More X-Rays, still messed up. This time he tells me he needs to knock me out for this last set, thank you Jesus.
But, I have to wait 3 hours because I had eaten dinner (I can't get knocked out), without any type of pain med. Eventually they take me into this room. There's a table next to me with some type of medieval-metal-torture-looking device and a drill, SWEET. I try asking them what that thing is for and they're like "surgery." As far as I knew the surgery wasn't for a few days but at this point I could give two s***, just knock me out PLEASE.
I wake up the next morning with a bolt through my heel, attached to the torture device with a weight, yes, a weight, attached to the bolt.
More to come 🙂
