Would you choose complicated freedom or incomplicated imprisonment?

“It’s as if a part of my brain wasn’t awake for all this time, as if it was having a break, but now, now it definitely is awake, wide awake”. My man shook his head in agreement.
After tasting a bit of freedom last week, tasting it once more today permanently reopened a feeling I didn’t have for the past year.

Seeing our Fannar enjoying himself this much when we went to walk last week whilst arranging my man’s driver’s license, we decided we had to try going somewhere with our car every week. It was a bit difficult finding a place where we hadn’t really been before. As I mentioned before, we don’t want to go to places anymore where we once came when it was still all four of us….
We decided to go where we once were when it was REALLY busy and didn’t finish our walk. This was in the late morning or early afternoon. This time we would get up at 4:30am and catch the first glimpse of the very start of today.
When we drove on an actual motorway, we noticed the car making a sound it hadn’t been making before. I immediately pointed out it had to be something regarding one of the wheels, as the frequency became much faster as my man floored the accelerator. Perhaps someone from our neighborhood had been trying to flatten a tire once again by putting a nail in front of the wheels..? My man cautiously released the steering wheel to see if the car would keep on driving in a straight line. It did. However, we decided to pull over to have a look and confirm this. We didn’t want to have a breakdown with the car in the middle of a busy road where the rozzers would definitely find us and notice we were driving with no MOT.
I got out and as my man slowly kept on driving, I observed the tyres. I couldn’t find anything. We assumed that it had to be a small object stuck between the profile of one of the tires and got back on the road.
Arriving at the park about 15 minutes later, one of the first cars we saw off the motorway, was a rozzer car. Whenever we spot one, we get nervous as fuck. They somehow always manage to find something wrong and if they don’t, they get annoyed and I call them names so that in the end they HAVE something against us. We don’t care about the fines, though, we care about our time well spent without any interference or something that involves talking to humans, especially to the hypocrite, lying rozzers. Last week when we got back, they also managed to appear in front of our very eyes on the busiest motorway in my country. I mean, what are the odds..?

We started our walk and we noticed almost immediately that there were many paths where dogs had to be on leash or were prohibited altogether. Mind you, we never bring a leash for our Fannar, but we have one with us for the dogs we look after. Today Sjors was with us.
We took the path that went through the field which happened to be exactly where dogs could walk off leash. It was so nice to be somewhere other than mum’s garden or the wannabe park pretty much next to her house…
After 2km we deployed our drone and shot some footage and pictures. We wanted to stay there for much longer. There were birds chirping that definitely don’t exist in my city or perhaps I simply never hear them because of the 3 motorways next to my district and the huge flat a few metres behind mum’s garden. Nature seemed greener than it had ever been before and the sun seemed to take her time to rise just for us.
However, there’s always pressure. It’s a busy place there during the day and mum always gets up at the very same time every day, so we had to move on.
We arrived at a bicycle lane which we had to take, since the road for hikers prohibited dogs. We soon learned that the day had already begun, as there were cyclists, runners, hikers and even a skater. For us this meant we had to either go back all the way where we came from with little to no time OR we had to take the small path for the hikers.
I leashed Sjors and my man grabbed Fannar. We walked back through a grassy path much like the one we took in the beginning. It was swampy and my second hand shoes with holes didn’t deal well with that. But I was still able to enjoy the sun rays onto the trees, the colourful flowers, baby ducklings, snails sliding their way up against higher grass, hares and deer running about and my little Fannar getting almost too excited about finally seeing, hearing and smelling other things than my city’s own.
Upon arriving back at the car we saw the car park was filled with other cars. We quickly went into ours and my man wanted to double check the tires, but had to abort this task due to even more people arriving.
When my man started the car, I couldn’t help but notice the heater didn’t work. It didn’t really matter with these temperatures and I thought the car just needed some time to warm up, so I forgot about it… Until I got reminded to it when the heater would be blowing really cold air after driving some time.
As a driving habit, my man automatically looks at his gauges every few minutes, but since driving itself was so new to him once again, he did it less often today. He glanced at his motor temperature after I pointed out the heater isn’t working accordingly and he immediately told me that the engine was getting too warm.
He drove off the motorway into a built-up area and pulled over. After opening the bonnet, he quickly noticed the tube of the cooling system had come off somehow and this had released all the cooling fluid (aka tap water – nothing fancy!).
Thankfully my man had decided to fill up a can with water a few weeks ago, just-in-case and after filling and fiddling and a proper fountain out of the bonnet, we were good to go again. The temperature gauge dropped slowly and we would still hang around a bit just to be on the safe side. We then continued driving home and arrived just in time and let me tell you that that feeling sucks…
But…
Yes it was worth it. Every second of it.