The Time Mum Almost Died in the City of Romance

Sight-seeing, bike riding and funeral planning.

I don’t know why Paris is called the city of romance. Like most people, when I first visited, I was expecting to walk into a scene from Moulin Rouge — I thought it would smell of macarons and croissants and love.

Instead, it was an assault on the senses. The streets smelt of piss; an overwhelming pungency that made its way into your nasal passage and stayed there. As if the lingering smell of urine wasn’t enough, there were scammers on almost every street corner. I don’t know about you but I didn’t find someone chasing after me with a dropped ring, romantic. If you don’t know about the Paris scams, check them out. There are many.

The only thing I liked about Paris was how easy it was to ride a bike there. It was the first European city I’d hired a bike in, and I loved exploring the city that way. Mostly because on a bike, you could pick up enough speed that the wind in your face overcame the smell of the streets. The first time I visited Paris, my sister and I rode across the city from Père Lachaise Cemetery to the Eiffel Tower. On the ride home, we looked back at the Eiffel Tower in the sunset and for the first time since I’d arrived, I stopped to admire the view. It did kinda look nice. Maybe even a little romantic — if you could ride fast enough.

So the second time I visited Paris — yes, I know, I obviously forgot the smell and only remembered the sunset — I convinced Mum to ride with me. Mum was sceptical at first but I found a group riding tour that guided you through all of the main attractions. Even better, I booked us into an evening tour. The Louvre really is beautiful at night, almost as romantic as the Eiffel Tower twinkling away. But the headlights of other cars on the road were blinding and even I was a little scared navigating the streets in the dark.

What could go wrong, though? We were in a big group and somehow, I’d volunteered myself as the tail-leader at the end of the pack. I actually think it was more so I could keep an eye on Mum, knowing full well that out of all the twenty to thirty-year-olds there, she’d be the slowest at sixty-four.

We were actually having so much fun. I was laughing at how seriously Mum was taking her challenge: Keep up with the group. I would mush mush her along because if we fell too far behind, we’d lose our power to ‘dominate the road’. This was the group leader’s advice. When you’re on a bike in Paris, you had to dominate. Be assertive and have the confidence to get where you want to go. As a group, this was fairly easy. Think: safety in numbers. However, as the night wore on and we were clocking more and more kilometres, Mum began to to tire. She started doubting herself a little more each time we had to cross across traffic and dominate.

We were coming up to our last stop, the Eiffel Tower. Being the most popular tourist attraction, there were buses parked all along the footpath alongside where we were riding. Understandably, it was a very main road, and there were cars driving alongside us, sometimes it felt like we had mere inches between us and the moving traffic. We were in high-vis vests so one would hope we’d be pretty hard to hit.

For some reason, everyone else in the group was riding in a relatively straight line, but Mum had started to stray out onto the road.

‘Mum, move over,’ I yelled. ‘You’re in the middle of the road.’

Her legs and brain must have been getting tired.

A car came speeding by and startled her, missing her by a few centimetres. ‘Argh, bloody hell. Where did that come from!?’

‘The road,’ I yelled. ‘Get off the fucking road.’

I really didn’t want to be responsible for her death. I was, after all, the tail-leader and I took my position very seriously.

I must admit we were in a tight spot, riding alongside what felt like hundreds of parked buses, between them and the traffic.

Then I heard it. The sound of an engine distinctly different from that of a car. Looking behind me, I saw it. A bus headed our way.

I whipped my head around to see Mum, still wandering about the road, all laissez-faire as if she were the only one in the world.

‘Mum,’ I screamed. ‘A bus!’

She veered off the road and instead of riding alongside the parked buses, she steered her bike straight into one. I wanted to close my eyes. I didn’t want to bear witness to my mum ping-ponging from a parked bus into a moving bus.

Somehow as she hit the parked bus, she regained her balance and straightened up. The bus passed. She survived.

‘Mum, are you okay?’ I cried out to her.

No reply.

Moments later, we pulled up at the Eiffel Tower. She was in tears.

‘Were you trying to die!?’ Now I was mad at her.

‘You told me there was a bus so I tried to get off the road.’

‘I said there was a bus, not drive into the bus!’

She was quite shaken, and I didn’t blame her. When I thought of riding the streets of Paris, I never thought I’d be simultaneously planning my mother’s funeral.

At the end of the tour, I was relieved she’d survived. The funeral plans could wait. I received a t-shirt for my efforts of ‘keeping the group safe (aka Mum)’. That trip was a little over eight years ago, and it’s still one of my favourite t-shirts. It serves as a good reminder; not all heroes wear capes.

There are two sides to every story. If you want to read Adrienne Beaumont’s side, stay tuned.