Take a look at my chopper! It’s my prized possession. Ned sometimes rides along side
of me on his Vespa, but I have to go so slow that my high powered engine
almost dies. I sometimes let him ride on the seat behind me.

One of the perks of our business is that we get to go on some international trips
to promote our bananas. We tend to mix a little pleasure in, and on this trip to
France, we took a bike ride along the Seine at twilight.

Ned and I are quite the athletic and
adventurous type. so while in
France we figured, why not enter
the Tour de France bicycle race?
We entered as one of the few
tandem riders allowed in the race.
Formidable! I think that’s a french word?

We were keeping pace pretty well with all those single racers,
and even out in front of a bunch of them,
when whomp!, our front
tire hit a big pothole, and we went flying! Wouldn’t you think those french people who organized the race would fill up all the potholes
before they let a few thousand bicycle tires run into them?

We needed to make a business trip to Marrakesh and realized the annual
Morocco ATV Desert Classic was to be held at the same time. We had our
custom ATV shipped over. What a race! Ringo enjoyed the ride in the back,
though he flipped out a few times until we decided we had better rope him
in. Next time we will all three wear goggles, since the sand was murder on
the eyes! We didn’t win, but I think that’s because the other racers had
only one rider per ATV, and we had two monkeys and a bulldog, which
gave us a definite weight disadvantage. Otherwise, no way could we
have finished 87th out of 87!

Soon after hitting the road to Qatar, we came across a sign directing us
to a camel race. We are always in the mood to compete, and even though
we had never been on a camel, we figured we could race with the best of
them!

We had quite a long way to drive to Qatar, but we had banana business
there to transact. The camel race, the 112th Qatar Sand Flats Classic, was
open to new entries. Of course, first we had to find a camel. We found a
one named Zahir and proceeded to the track.

Ned and I fit pretty well on top of Zahir, though Ned had to hold on to
me for dear life. We wanted Ringo to go along for the ride, but there
was no space. Ringo was watching from the sidelines, when suddenly
he took off after us, frightening Zahir, and disqualifying us from the race.

We needed to travel to Egypt next for a business meeting. We had no
intention of keeping Zahir, but have you ever looked into a camel’s eyes
and not felt a connection? We did, and we decided to keep him. He
trotted behind our ATV as we ventured on toward Cairo. That did slow
us down quite a bit.

After conducting our business, we played the tourists and trekked to
the pyramids and the Sphinx. How convenient to have Zahir to ride!
We even squeezed Ringo up on top after he couldn’t keep up with us in
the heat and sand.

What a sight the pyramids were!

We always enjoy our annual trip to Brazil to conduct banana business
and to see our cousins, Rafi and Lola, who live in the Amazon Rainforest.
We have to save our energy for the trip, because we go there during Carnival in Rio, and the cousins always show us a wild time. Brazilian monkeys know how to trip the light fantastic, especially in Rio at Carnival time.

I told you that they were a little wild, but then everyone goes a little
overboard during Carnival. They had extra fruit hats and wanted us
to wear them, but we politely declined. We did wear a few beads around our necks.
We watched as they walked the parade route. We didn’t know they could
dance like that.

We spent the day after the parade sleeping. The next day, we conducted
banana transactions. We import a considerable amount of Brazilian
bananas for our freeze dried operation, and we’re well respected
in the Brazilian banana community.

We had a blast taking the zip line over the beautiful city of Rio.
Humans usually zip over one at a time, but since we are
monkeys, Rafi and Lola believed that we should all hang
together for more excitement.