When epiphany comes too late....

Riding my bike is my FAVORITE activity, so I ventured out on my bike today only to find out that I can't even ride one handed, much less release the steering altogether, something I was quite good at.
I decided to pick up a few things at Safeway off of Waterman which is about 1.5 miles from our house. Its usually a 10 minute drive but it took a good 45 minutes roundtrip on the bike. (not including the 20 minutes I spent in the store). There is a lot of truth to not going to the grocery store when you are hungry. Everything that was within reach looked so good that I almost bit into a loaf of french bread... mmm.

So feeling very good about myself for saving gas, the environment and my willingness to exercise, I hopped on my clean new bike, put on the ugly ass blue helmet I bought at Walmart this weekend and went on a seemingly calm bike ride.
Yeah, seemingly calm until I came upon my first "mountain" on the road. It was a slight upward grade not even noticeable when you are driving, but on a bike it was quite a workout. Getting to the store was not the problem, it was on the way back, backpack stuffed with groceries that I started to realize that this may not have been a good idea. The eggs especially concerned me because the bagger boy decided to put them on top of the fruit even though I specifically told him to put it separately because I'm riding a bike... so the entire ride home I was praying the eggs didn't fall off the fruit and bump into the salad dressing bottle.

I got over the same upward grade, huffing and puffing more this time, because there was a few pounds of food on my back and got home in time to find that everything was intact and not broken. I put all the food away and sat down to relax a bit... and that is when it hit me that there is a grocery store across the street from the house. At least I got a great workout... for three pieces of items that I could've walked across the street for. :-)