The Safety Zone

[pooks]

I didn't know what to call this thread, so oh well.

Wearing my Jenny Ewing t-shirt today raised an issue that has come up quite a bit since I've been riding -- my safety. Or rather, my husband's concerns for my safety.

It boils down to this. He thinks the only place I'm "safe" is riding loops in the neighborhood, or if I go to a bike trail, riding with someone else (preferably him).

The bike route through our town goes past apartments that he feels are dangerous (because the cops get called there fairly frequently) so he doesn't think I should be riding in that direction. The biking/walking trail that is in riding distance has areas that are very dense with trees and it's easy to imagine somebody up to no good lurking, waiting for somebody to pounce on. I stopped walking there some time ago because it made me uneasy -- but lots of people still do. When we asked at the LBS if it was "safe" we were told "No!" but it turns out that they meant there was too much foot traffic and unpredictable behaviour from kids and dogs and such, so it's a pain for cyclists. When I asked about the other kind of "safe" they were kind of, "eh, well, I don't like my wife riding there alone but she does it anyway."

But wait. It gets worse.

So, I sometimes will ride to the shopping center (1/2 mile away) and even THAT freaks him out. Even though the parking lot is huge and it's easy to ride across a rear open area that gives great visibility to any cars, he still thinks it's dangerous to ride across there because I'll get hit by an idiot cutting across the parking lot too fast.

Let's see ... what other stuff is not safe? Well, probably anything I can think of that isn't riding in the nabe, doing loops. Ahem.

So please tell me I'm not the only one with a guy who is freaky about everything (and yes this is in character for him -- he's one of these guys who isn't comfortable unless he's around to make sure everything is "safe" and that means he'd be much happier flying if he could sit in the cockpit and watch what the pilots were doing -- when he wasn't hanging out the window figuring out which river/lake/city we're flying over, or checking out the tiny icebergs bobbing in the ocean.)

Of course, chasing tornados isn't dangerous at ALL, because HE knows what he's doing. LOL

Does anybody else deal with these kinds of issues? I pretty much do what I want to anyway, but sometimes I do find myself feeling uneasily like maybe I'm taking risks just to prove I can. (Yeah, I'm like that.)