A challenging few days

Please excuse all the little tangents in this post. I thought about editing them out and decided to leave them so you can better see how busy and scattered I've been.

I'm heading out for DALMAC before the sun rises Wedenesday morning. This trip is unlike any other travel I've done before. Not only will I be biking long miles for five days strait (Lansing to Mt Pleasant to McBain to Elk Rapids to Petoskey to Mackinaw City), I'll also be camping. I've been camping with Buster a few times, but never a progressive camp where you have to tear down, move to a new location, and set up again each day. And I've done only one other multi-day bike trip. That was two days riding in California's Russian River Valley with a really wonderful friend that I don't see nearly enough of. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding and that trip was a bit of a bachelorette party with a touch less drinking and a lot more exercise than normally called for at such events.

That's us at Hop Kiln. We stayed in a great little Inn and had a wonderful time. But back to the point. A multi-day bike trip combined with camping is a new experience for me.

I'm a little bit of a nervous traveler. I spend days before any trip thinking about what I need to pack and gathering things and making sure things at home are taken care of and generally preparing. I'm even worse when it's some new kind of trip. So, I'm very very excited about DALMAC and I've been stressing myself out a little trying to get my things together and get ready to be gone from home and work for a week. I've also been trying to ride my bicycle as much as possible. So I've had a pretty packed schedule for the last couple weeks.

In the midst of my DALMAC preparation, I've had some fun family things to do. My challenging few days started out with some family friends in Bloomfield. They have a very nice house with a beautiful swimming pool and they invited us and the K's for a mid-week BBQ and pool party. BK was in town from San Francisco with her adorable daughter. I don't see them nearly often enough and BK is the big sister I never had. So I took half the day off to go play with my family.

I had a really nice time swimming with the girls and talking with BK and everyone else. I wish I would have stayed for the whole thing!

I left the party a bit early so I could meet up with the aabts in Plymouth for a ride on Hines Drive. As I was pulling out of the the neighborhood, one of these:


driving one of these:


was stopped at the stop sign in front of me trying to make a left hand turn in rush hour traffic. It was taking an awful long time for traffic to clear and he got frustrated. So he threw the giant SUV in reverse and backed strait into my poor little Ford Escort without a single glance in the rearview. (ok, the driver was a little older than the one depicted above, but not much.) We were on a residential street and I keep wondering, what if it wasn't my little escort, but somebody's dog, or worse yet, a child that he blindly backed into? It makes me a a little sick. And frankly, I must be getting old because it also makes me question the wisdom of allowing 16-yr-olds to operate dangerous machines.

In any case, now I have to deal with this:


That looks minor, but it's nearly $1500 in body damage to bumper and hood. On top of that, the car now sounds like someone tore the muffler off. My trustworthy mechanic (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but Fox Auto on Dexter Rd in Ann Arbor is fantastic) took one listen and told me it's most likely a cracked exhaust manifold. Indeed, much to my surprise, some parts of the exhaust system are right there up front and they're brittle. He told me the accident almost certainly caused the damage.

The poor kid driving the SUV was quaking in his boots and near tears at the thought of giving me his insurance information or filing a police report. So I got his name and phone number and gave him mine and told him to have his parents call me the next day. (This is me being too darn trusting... Live and learn.)

By the time I arrived in Plymouth for my bike ride I was too late to ride with the club, but all was not lost. My friend Courtney was also a bit late so we had a nice ride together on Hines drive.

To add to the annoyances, before the family party I'd gotten a call from my sister-in-law, Sarah. She's married to Buster's brother so we also share the same last name. UofM health labs sent my blood test results to her. While I like and trust my sister-in-law, I'm a rather upset that the lab is not more careful to avoid a breach of privacy like this. I plan to call and complain and ask them to be more careful in the future. If they do it again, I'm thinking I might be calling a lawyer. (fyi, blood tests all came back normal and healthy. That's the good news. The bad news is I still don't know why I'm having such a miserably difficult time losing weight.)

I got up Friday morning and went strait to Dusty's Collision to get an estimate to fix the damage to my car. Then I went to my sister-in-law's office to pick up my lab results. Here's where she works:


That's the Deke Shant. It's owned by the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, and houses their national offices. Sarah works for the national office. She gave me a tour of the building. It's smaller than I thought, but still very impressive. I especially liked the stained glass windows on the upper floor. Unfortunately I didn't get pictures.

By the end of the work day Friday (clearly I didn't get much work done) I still hadn't heard from the SUV kid's parents. I googled the phone number he gave me to verify that he wasn't trying to pull a fast one. The results matched the name he gave me and also spit out the first names of his parents and their address. I love google. I called and left a polite message on their answering machine asking them to return my call. I'm naturally a bit too trusting but I was really getting suspicious at this point.

The car thing was definitely stressing me out so I needed my Friday evening bike ride and post ride beer more than ever. Sadly, not quite half way through the ride the storms and rain that were only 30% likely landed right on top of us. We got soaked. So the ride was a bust but dinner and beer with my bicycle friends at Casey's was just as fun as ever.

Saturday, with a list as long as my arm of things I wanted to get done and still no word from SUV kid, I was getting very very frustrated. I called the number the kid gave me again around 11:30am. The mother answered. I told her I wanted to come up to Bloomfield and file a police report and go through insurance to get my car fixed and I told her about Dusty's estimate and the cracked exhaust manifold. She told me she would call me back in 20 minutes when her husband had left. She didn't want him to find out. She called back at 12:30pm to tell me she'd changed her mind and wanted to wait for her husband to return because it was so much money. When the husband/father finally called around 2pm he had some outlandish plan to have my car taken to his buddy's body shop in another town to be fixed. I handed the phone to Buster.

Buster may not always be the most sensitive or romantic of husbands but he always knows when and how to stand up for me. And that's way more important to me than flowers and candle light. He flat out told that guy NO. We would either do the right thing and file a police report and go through insurance or he would give us the money to get the car fixed here in Ann Arbor.

Michigan is a no-fault state so my insurance pays to fix my car when I'm involved in a traffic accident no matter who's at fault. And there was no damage (that I could see) to his giant SUV. I'm sure his insurance would be made aware of the accident, but I doubt they'd change his premiums unless the kid was issued a ticket. And I don't think it's possible for the kid to get a ticket since we didn't call the police to the scene. I can't figure out why filing a police report and going through my insurance to fix my car was a problem for him.

I could only hear Buster's side of the conversation but they were definitely not coming to an agreement. Buster told him we'd be filing a police report the next day. When he hung up he asked me if I had time to go right away. I hopped in the car and headed for the Bloomfield township police department immediately.

I expected to get chewed out for not calling the police to the scene. I didn't. The officer that took my report was very nice. When he asked if I'd called the other party to have them to come in and file the report with me I told him about the conversation with the father and that I simply wasn't comfortable contacting them again (honestly, every Hummer I saw in Bloomfield made me a little nervous). The officer gathered all my information, gave me a complaint number and sent me on my way within just a few short minutes. He told me he was going to follow up with the other party immediately. I was relieved.

I ran home, showered and dressed, and headed for Monroe (in my noisy car) where some close family friends were renewing their vows. I missed the beginning of the ceremony but the end was lovely and the party was great fun. I'll post pictures when I get them.

I was confident that the stress and hectic running around of the last few days was over as I pulled into my drive near midnight last night. It was a pretty warm evening and I was looking forward to walking into my air conditioned house and changing out of my dress clothes and relaxing with Buster for a bit. Only, when I walked in the door, the house was way warmer than it should have been, it was only slightly cooler than outside. oh dear...

So, on top of my mis-routed medical information, my messed up car, nearly getting screwed by rich people driving large scary SUVs, missing one bike ride and getting soaking wet on another, our AC was broken. Waah!

I bought myself a new pair of these to make myself feel better:

Some girls buy Manolo Blahniks, I buy Sidis. Also, I found a new favorite bike shop.

I feel much better now.