This, from the department of self-disclosing dumb things I have done.
For a while I had the habit of placing my bikes on top of the car in the Thule/Rocky Mounts/Yakima rack, and then forgetting that there was, in fact, a bike up there.
You can guess what happened next.
A few years ago, at a local bike shop, when I took my mountain bike in after the headset cracked on a downhill while riding, the guy asked me if I’d hucked the bike off a 10 foot drop or something.
“Uh, no,” I said, “Never.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Well, there’s really no other way this could happen. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Smashed it against the top of your garage because you forgot it was up there on your car.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d been outed.
He took one look at my guilty expression. “You garaged it, didn’t you.”
“Yeah, I did. I garaged it,” I said.
My riding buddy Ed says that it’s acceptable for every person to garage their bike. Once. After that, he says, you have a stupidity problem.
Over the years, I have garaged several bikes. Several times each. I’ve broken a frame, horribly dented and scratched the roof of the car, bent racks beyond repair, and ruined a seat. It’s gotten to the point where I hide the garage door opener in the glove compartment as soon as I strap the bike onto the rack. Or I stand the vacuum cleaner in the middle of the garage, so I can’t pull in. And then, hours later when I open the door, I’m like, who put the damn vacuum cleaner right in the middle of the garage?
Maybe I have a stupidity problem. (I see you, dear friends, nodding in agreement.) I blame the fact that I smoked pot all through my freshman year in high school. Killed lots and lots of brain cells, I did, walking the streets of my hometown, listening to The Doors, Van Halen, and Led Zeppelin on a gigantic boom box that my stoner friends and I took turns carrying.
Whatever the reason, I have often found myself in space cadet land, forgetting all about that very expensive apparatus on top of the car. Therefore, I must protect my self from myself.
Funny, how that goes.
PS. In below pic, you can see the tell-tale signs of garaging: several deep marks where the handlebars smashed into the siding.
Rocky Mountain Biker 