ALGOMARINE

Doing the Captain v. to “go down with the ship”. Usually the result of a biker failing to clip out in time.

This weekend has been full of frustration. It started on Friday night, when Joanie, Anne and I tried to go see the Chinese lantern show at the gardens. This weekend’s stupendously cool weather had given us this idea.

Unfortunately, the same idea had occurred to the rest of Saint Louis too. The lantern show was sold out. By way of consolation, we swung by the zoo to see the new sea-lion exhibit. Unfortunately, we got there too late, the zoo was still open, but the sea-lion exhibit had closed already.

Saturday morning dawned and I arose with plans for the day, but after showering, I descended to the basement with a basket of laundry to do. There I discovered that the sewer line had backed-up. This discovery elicited a call to Roto-Rooter. While I managed the service call, Anne went online and tried to buy lantern tickets, but found that the garden was sold-out for the weekend. By the time the Roto-Rooter man had finished and left, it was noon. I cleaned up the basement and applied a liberal amount of bleach. Now our basement smells like a swimming pool.

Eventually, we launched on our bicycles and rode towards Forest Park. It had been a while. We were almost around the bike path once, when we decided to stop off at the zoo and have another go at the sea-lion exhibit. Unfortunately, the zoo was crowded and the line for the sea-lion exhibit was too long to wait through. On our way out of the zoo, we decided to head over to the Central West End for a little something. After we unlocked our bikes and had threaded them through the crush of the crowd, Anne and I became separated. She headed east, the most direct route to the CWE. I headed west, following our route around the bike path. We soon realized our separation and through iPhone communications arranged our rendezvous.

We pedaled over to the CWE, cruised up Euclid and decided to stop at Duff’s. Unfortunately, that is when I did the captain and went down with the ship. I had already unclipped my left foot and was trying to unclip my right when it happened. Unfortunately, I had come to a stop just inches from the curb and there was not enough room for me to turnout my shoe and unclip. Anne was right behind me and had the best view of this slow-motion tableau. Why I didn’t lean to the left and put down my already unclipped left foot, I don’t know. I haven’t done the captain in years.

Suspended, balanced for an eternity, I came crashing down on the sidewalk in an instant. The hostess came running over to help me get up and a table of patrons called out, “Are you alright?” Anne laughed. Later, her revisionist explanation contended that it was because I had checked my bike first, before I checked my knee. This is true, but she was already laughing when I did that. Plus she was still smirking when we took our table.

My bike was fine and I was only a little worse for wear (see below). Other than me, the only thing worse for wear was our little silver camera, our so-called throw down camera. It still works though. It has at least one more crash in it. In part to cover my shame, I told Anne that at least I have some blog fodder for tonight now.

The Baconator