Just like Cipplolini

So for you who thought Europe was cycling-crazy/ -friendly, let me tell you, you are wrong. First of all, the weather sucks ;-) but despite snowy conditions I decided to go ahead and do my motor pacing session as planned. I didn’t get too far though. We were cursing along at a decent pace when suddenly a cop car showed up and pulled us over… well, turns out that Mr. Police officer didn’t like cyclists (at least that’s the only explanation I could come up with) and started lecturing me and my dad on how dangerous “whatever-we-were-doing” was. As if that wasn’t enough he really wanted to drive his point home and stomped back to his car to browse through the fine-catalog and write us a hefty ticket. It took him forever (I guess he couldn’t really find a punishable action that fit motor pacing) but he finally presented us with a ticket over € 98 (that is $ 126). Actually, he gave us two separate tickets. One was for “dangerous speed” (we did 45 km/h through a village; max speed in Luxembourg in villages: 50 km/h...) and one for “use of hazard lights” (which we put on to warn other people on the road that we might be a bit slower then the rest; seems to be a bad idea, especially in the weather we had today).



Anyways, stupid stuff, but nothing we could do about it. So we paid the fine and I rode the rest of the way by myself (they wouldn’t leave until my dad had taken off, so no more motor pacing for the day). Let me tell you: riding at lt by yourself for over an hour is no fun compared to doing it behind a car. Plus it is really hard to hit the speeds you would like…

Well, at least now I can say I’ve got one thing in common with the big Cippolini: getting a ticket for motor pacing (even though I wasn’t doing 70 km/h on a highway). Europe might not be as harmonized as the States and cultures are very different but at least when it comes to giving tickets to cyclists, Italy and Luxembourg seem to be on the same page…