Barclay Bikes are sweet!

As some of you may or may not know, mes parents came to London last week for eight days of adventure and cultural enrichment.  Naturally, given my mother's love for the arts and my father's lust for knowledge, we went to a lot of museums and sites around the city (more on that later).  One minor treat was our biking excursions complements of Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme.  Since July of last year, there are over 300 docking stations and kiosks throughout central London in which bikes can be rented for cheap (~1 pound/24 hours).

After nearly a whole semester of the tube travel (which can be quite cumbersome at select hours), blazing my own trail on a bike was refreshingly novel.  Riding at unsafe speeds and worrying my mother was only a plus.  Yet, consistent with England's preternatural insistence on inefficiency, the actual rental process was very frustrating especially to my father who has an unusually high standard for customer service and whose bout with extinct big box retailer Linens 'n Things still lives on in infamy.

Anyway, I'm straying from the point.  I love the bikes!  There's a station outside of my flat in South Kensington and I've been biking two or three times since my parent's departure, most recently to Hyde Park.