The Daily Oulu Rush Hour (with some spilt blood and a lost tooth)

I got some pics today of the daily commute. When the weather is nice we can all ride our bikes to school and work together. It's 4 miles to the schools, which are right on the edge of downtown and is quite a nice pedal - but really pedaling anywhere in Oulu is a joy. Riding a bike never gets old and there's some sense of accomplishment felt just arriving somewhere you don't get being in a car. So Isabelle has been riding her new bike to school quite a bit, much to our amazement. She had never ridden more than a mile or two at one time and is now riding 8 miles a day.

She has been getting much more confident in her bike handling and is learning to keep the bike straight and not to stop in the middle of the bike lane - it's easy to forget the bike way is a highway (albeit a slower moving one) and there's usually someone passing you in both directions. But most important to remember is that the bike lanes allow mopeds and small motorcycles as well and some can zip by quite fast (usually those Finnish high school hoodlums listening to their death metal).

So any ways I've been playing around with sports tracker on my N78 and it has the nifty little feature that it can upload your pictures tagged with your GPS location to show where you took the pic. So there's no need to let the gov't monitor you, as you can do it yourself now. The full pics are here.

Oh, and the blood and tooth. Isabelle ran off the road on the way home from school and crashed in an attempt to get herself out of the gravel and back on the road. Amidst here attempt she hit a hole and flew over the handlebars and fell on her face. I wasn't there, but the story goes that the street was covered in blood but when she noticed her tooth was missing she got a little excited. Luckily the tooth was recovered and is waiting to be exchanged for euros. So despite the trauma and bruises and some new loose teeth, there was some small reward in dusting herself off, riding home, and putter her tooth below her pillow for the nigh. Now I have to come up with 5 euros to pay off the T-Fairy - that exchange rate is killing me.