Boy, Bike, Branch, Boo-Boo

With gas prices every climbing, and summer temps allowing for outdoor exercise again, I have started to ride my bicycle to work whenever possible this summer. Last week I managed to ride a couple of the days and that led to the following true story:

The bicycle ride to wok that morning had been a breeze, quite literally a refreshing quick ride which got me to work in just 9 minutes (a new record), and that boosted my swagger enough to make the decision to ride home for lunch and back again rather than just find lunch close to work. I should have anticipated that the breeze the ride had been to work was not going to repeat itself right up front as it was quite difficult just getting across traffic on the very first street I needed to cross leaving campus. I started down the road then towards home. Very early on there is a park and many of its huge old trees have branches that hang out low over the side of the road and I had in the past successfully ducked them, but this ride turned out to be an exception. As I sat tall in my saddle (and yes, with helmet on) I approached the low branches ahead and a plotted a course that would avoid the worst of them and allow me to duck the others. What I didn't notice this time though was that behind the branches I could see was one more I couldn't. As I cleared what I thought was the last bit of branches, I raised up my head only to be immediately whacked across the side of my face with a vicious blow from a twig (that certainly felt like a log) that knocked my glasses down to my chin and forced me to stop and readjust my helmet, my face, and my pride (as I'm sure the many passing cars got a bit of a laugh watching it all unfold). I was tough though. No branch would wipe me out and so I continued on home and ate lunch, noticing that the branch had messed up the side of my face with a nice long scratch, and then helmeted up and rode back to work, this time successfully navigating the branch. There would be no retribution, no early AM trip to the spot with clippers in the cover of night to exact a revenge under the guise of making it safe for other riders. No, it will simply be left as the story of a boy on his bike, bitten by a branch, boohoo'ing his booboo, and bravely barreling back by, barely batting an eye.