Deep Freeze Activities

It's cold here. Really cold. Up until last week, it had been the warmest winter on record in Luxembourg, then this cold set in. Thankfully, we haven't been hit with the extreme weather that southern and eastern Europe has dealt with, but its certainly uncomfortable. It is so cold the dog can't go out after dark or his feet freeze on his walks. So, for the time being there aren't any weekend rides scheduled. That means, of course, a lot of time is being spent on the trainer and in the house.

We live in a row home that has a garage four cars deep. Our realtor suggested we bring our limousines from America. Much to his disappointment we didn't bring any cars, of course. They had been sold. We have a car here now, a very nice and economical hatchback that we have to put gas in maybe every three weeks thanks to the diesel. So, 1/4 of the garage is for the car. Another 1/4 stores leftover moving boxes we have to take to the recycle center in town. After over a month of living here we finally found it and not a moment too soon as its starting to look like Alice's Restaurant in there. When that's all removed, we'll leave the space free for visitors to pull in so they don't have to pay for parking. The next 1/4 is storage space. The back 1/4 is the home gym. With a couple of benches, a Weider machine, and a set of Bowflex interchangeable dumbbells, we have a pretty complete system. Of course, a sliver of the room is reserved for the wind trainer that my husband and I share. We finally purchased a cheap Euro TV to negate the need for staring at the concrete wall. It's a pretty nice set up (pictured) for long rides to no where and is certainly better than nothing not riding at all.

Off the garage is another storage area with a second garage door (pictured, along with my reminder checklist). It's not big enough to comfortably park a car, but it's perfect to house the bikes and tools and such. When we finally thaw out enough to ride, we can pull out directly from that room instead of hauling everything through the length of the house. I'm currently working on setting that up into a shop space. The walls and ceiling are solid concrete so we can't hang the bikes in the usual ways. So, the Mr. will construct a free standing rack soon to maximize our storage space. Meanwhile, I'm finally getting tools, spare parts, and all the other random paraphernalia organized and sorted. It's nice to have clean usable space. Pictures of the completed shop will be up at some point.

Of course, even with it being so cold it's hard to spend a whole weekend working in the house. We're in Europe, after all, and we want to see it! Last Saturday we took the car and the dog out for a ride in the northern part of Luxembourg known as the Ardennes and the region known as Petit Suisse. We had a nice time just exploring the countryside and the small villages. We stopped for a break in Clervaux, an extremely picturesque town with a Gothic church and a castle (pictured). Everything was closed up, so we snatched a couple pictures and dived back into the warmth of the car.

As it stands, this cold front is supposed to linger until the end of the month, so we'll probably be spending our time in similar ways. Although, this weekend we may visit the IKEA in France everyone has been talking about.

I've never been to an IKEA...