Bicycle

I was looking under the hood of my Morgan County Highway Department Jeep Cherokee with Andy McCarrey (Water Co.) and Gup Kramer (Champaign Public Works).  We got it going and Andy offered to drive my pickup truck while I drove the Jeep.  I was surprised when Gup went and got in the pickup w/ Andy, since they don’t know each other, but I appreciated the chance to see what my truck looks like from behind as it goes down the road.  I thought it would look bigger than it did.  In fact it was barely wider than would fit one person.

After following it down a road along a creek for a few minutes, it was no longer a truck but was just Andy on a bicycle.  He quickly turned off the road and headed down to the bank toward the little creek.  I couldn’t see the creek, but it must have been shallow because he shot out the other side peddling furiously and headed up the bank, which on that side was a bluff about 100 feet high.  He carried a lot of speed because he hardly slowed down when it got nearly vertical toward the top and when he crested the top he actually shot into the air a few feet before he landed and rode off out of sight.

At this point I was on a bicycle, too, and I rode into a restaurant in Martinsville (IN).  I did one of those tricks where I jumped up onto a table and the bike came up with me.  I rode across a couple adjoining tables and down the length of a bar, dodging the plates and glasses.  I didn't hit anything, but the people sitting at the tables and bar didn't look pleased with my being there. 

I rode to an apartment in the upstairs of an old house in Baltimore.  Inside the room was a stuffed chair and a TV set.  I watched a little TV, but nothing good was on.  I found what looked like a badminton racket that had a stem between the face and the handle about 4 feet long.  I stood there and practiced shots w/ the racket.  The stem was so long that the wind resistance of the face slowed the strokes a lot.

I walked out of the room, down a hallway and into another room.  Ruth was lying on a bed reading.  My long badminton racket had turned into a heavy wire rug beater at this point.  While I was standing behind her where she couldn’t see me I reached the rug beater out and tapped her on the leg.  She looked back and noticed me and I lay down beside her.  I told her I needed to get to the other side of town by 5:00.  It was about 60 miles away, right through the center of Baltimore, so I didn’t want to ride my bike.  I thought I could make it if I didn’t run into traffic or have other bike related troubles, but I would be exhausted when I got there.  I didn’t have a car so I asked her if she had one or knew where I could borrow one.