My Mom is going green.

[Cataboo]

Good for your mom!
Someone should get that bike tuned up though and the brakes checked, so it is safe to ride.

Ah, you're prescient.

My mother rode the bike home from work, walked it up the hill she lives on (it's godawful steep, I'm not sure I could get up it with a triple)....

And then when she gets home, she decides... Let's ride the bike down the driveway to the garage to put it away (the yard is fairly steep as well,and the garage is behind the house because of this... ) The driveway goes straight down and then curves around to the garage, which is under her sunroom... There's a big concrete pad in front of the garage, edging around that and then about a 3 foot drop to grass?

So she goes down the driveway, picks up a lot of speed... the brakes aren't working enough to slow her down.... putting her feet down isn't slowing her down, and so she rides the bike off the end of the driveway & crashes into the grass.

She said she was certain she was going to break her neck and scared the hell out of herself, but that she's fine and didn't actually hurt herself. she went on a long walk/run afterwards.

I tried to convince her to take some ibuprofen so she wouldn't be sore tomorrow,but no, she's fine. She bruises fairly easily, so I'm sure she must have some big ones.


This is reminding me of the time when I was doing gymnastics in high school and she decided that if I could do a backflip, it must be easy and decided to try to do one. She picked me up from practice with a sore neck.


I'm not sure whether I'll be able to convince her to get herself on a bike this weekend - she was busily telling me all about how dangerous it was and how I was going to kill myself and how I didn't even have sidewalks or bike lanes to ride on around me. And was saying that while she knew how to ride a bike, there was a lot of stuff that she needed to remember how to do or just get used to again....