Today I decided to ride my bike out to the Walter Bean Grand River Trail to take my new trail shoes out for a spin. I put on my running clothes and shoes, my Garmin, attached my running hat and hand-held bottle to my bike lock and locked it to my frame, put on my helmet and headed out the door.
When I arrived at the trail, I leaned my bike up against a signpost and grabbed my keys to unlock my lock from the bike so that I could secure my bike to the post. When looking at my keys… crap… I hadn’t brought my lock key with me. It was at home on my work keys. So, I decided to be creative and just make it *look* like I had locked my bike up by looping the coil-y cable lock around the post. Hmm.. this post was too big.. I needed to find something smaller. I looked around. Aha! I saw a much smaller sign post up in the grass a bit. I walked my bike over to it and swiftly wound the lock around and looped the hand-held water bottle portion through (I couldn’t get it off the lock, so I thought I would use it to my advantage and figured I’d just use my bike water bottle for the run). While doing this, I apparently made some hornets very angry and one stung my arm! Ouch! I hadn’t been paying attention to my surroundings other than just looking for something to attach my bike to that I completely missed the fact that there were hornets going in and out of this post. Well.. the bike was here now, so I might as well leave it. I backed away slowly to not anger any more insects and headed off down the trail, leaving my water bottles behind as I was not going to chance getting stung again, just to grab a bottle.
While I was running, I had a constant pain in my arm where the sting happened. Dang hornet. At least I had comfort in knowing that they were protecting my bike for me as it was not properly secured.
I was starting to enjoy my run, when I turned around a corner and was startled to see a mountain bike coming straight toward me. I jumped off the side of the trail and he apologized. No collisions – all is good.
The remainder of my run was quite uneventful and I enjoyed the new shoes, but as I was coming back toward my starting point, I was wondering how I would manage to get my bike back off the post o’ hornets. The answer: very carefully. I took my time, walked up to it slowly, studied the loops of the lock to see the simplest way to unwind it. I moved one section and backed away. One hornet came out of the post and checked out the scene. After it went back in, I approached to complete the task. I flipped the lock around and pulled my bike back as quick as I could, hoping it had come loose from the post. It had! Success! I examined my bike helmet and bike for any hornets and headed for home. I’d had enough adventure for one day.
