August 22nd rides

[withm]

Rode to work this morning. Stopped to help a woman with a flat tire - clearly she did not have a clue. She was with her 10 yr old son. No spare tube, but the tire looked so rotten that I wouldn't be surprised if the tube was ok, but the tire broken. LOL. My tubes are the wrong size for her so I was spared the decision of giving her one of them. She decided to walk it back down to the "bike shop" next to the antiques, and asked me to ride her son back to their beach rental house - it was only a couple miles so I did. Nice boy, very polite but his favorite subjects in school were PE and lunch. I had a good laugh. I can't believe she gave her son to a total stranger like that... But I saw him home, and he was to get an adult there to ride back with the car to fetch her. Sounds like a very complicated move since the bike shop ought to have been able to change the tube and tire while she waited, but maybe she
didn't have any money on her? Who knows.

Well they say no good deed goes unpunished... I then encountered 2 wrong-way cyclists on the bridge. I said "You are on the WRONG side of the road!" They yelled back, in either a foreign language, or gibberish. In any case they yelled louder than me so I guess they won. It was like "la la la la I can't hear you." Somehow we've got to get better enforcement on wrong way cyclists.

The bridge is our only hill here and it's not really that high but the approaches have a 5' marked path, narrowing to 3' on the actual bridge itself. Coming down the hill at 30mph, headed straight for wrong way cyclists coming UP on the wrong side of the road forces a giant game of chicken and sends someone out into the traffic lane, where the cars are going, yes, 50-60mph. This is not my idea of fun. We have a lot of summer workers here for seasonal jobs, mostly from eastern Europe, and it seems like most of them persist in riding on the left....

And if that wasn't enough excitement for one ride, I had to stop at a light about 2 miles from my office. I unclipped left side as usual, and must have been distracted cause I promtply went down on the right. Got my foot out, but not in time to stop the fall. There is a small breakfast spot there where people eat out on the deck. About 5 people from the restaurant came running to my aid, including most of that town's police force. Breakfast meeting? I insisted I was fine (albeit an idiot), but took the opportunity to express my disgust at wrong way cyclists and the danger they present to the other cyclists, and cars. Then I was on my way.

Thankfully my ride home was uneventful if you don't count the 13 miles of headwinds.

Martha