It is the beginning of another month more or less and thus time for another installment of the Ohmygod saga to catch up on the previous installments click on the Ohmygod menu up top. As you will recall, I used to be a cycling tour guide in Europe for several years. Some may wonder about the moniker, but the name chose itself really; it is what I uttered repeatedly during just about every interaction with him.
In the previous installment Part Fifty-Four , we had made it to our hotel in Gent, a converted monastery, where my attempts to have a quiet beer went for naught as the rest of the group, including the Ohmygod train wreck soon joined me. Through it all, though, I had maintained my secret plans for the evening.
Or so I thought…. For several moments, it seemed, I stood there dumbfounded, trying to calculate the odds of what was happening.
I had not told a single person on the trip that I was even contemplating dinner, much less indicating the location of my favorite restaurant in Gent. Thus, I figured the odds were ,, to 1 7 x 2 x 47 x 49 x that they all ended up there. Would I elect to join the group and certainly spoil my only free night of the trip, or would I duck around the corner, scoot back toward the hotel, search for another quaint restaurant, and enjoy a few hours of relative calm and solitude?
There are times in your life that when you look back on them, you realize that certain decisions that you made out of necessity, are quickly forgotten, as if tossed into an endless landfill of random acts. I eventually decided to join the group, consciously hoping that this decision fell into the latter category instead of the former. Either I was a serial masochist, a fool, or worse, an eternally delusional optimist, hoping that the behaviors I had witnessed from the people on the trip were not innate but rather slight personality aberrations of otherwise sane, kind, and perfectly normal fellow riders on the cross-life bus of human existence.
