When I asked MLW what she wanted for Christmas this year, she requested a fancy countertop egg cooker. This is a thing that makes hard boiled eggs, soft boiled eggs, poached eggs, omelettes, scrambled eggs, pheasant eggs under glass... (not sure about the last one). Seemed a perfectly reasonable request, so we ordered one up.
...and sent it back to exchange for another one that worked. And when the new one arrived we were missing one key component to egg making happiness: the eggs.
For me this presented an opportunity to kill three birds with one egg - I could make my sweetie happy, get in my Sunday ride, and get an opportunity to use my trike as transport and see how it would handle fragile items across the six miles or so of country blacktop between home and town.
The fragile part was really the only question in the mix. I’ve done multiple cargo runs into town on the trike, and carried some heavier items as well, but I wasn’t entirely sure how this one would go. My Catrike Expedition is a capable machine, but it has nothing on it resembling a suspension. And the roads here aren’t bad, but they do have their fair share of expansion joints and other imperfections to contend with, and I can confirm that my tuches is familiar with each and every one of them.
Still, I figured the worst that could happen would be needing to clean out a pannier bag and then having to drive in and shell out cash for more eggs. Seemed a reasonable risk, so off I went.
When you live out in the country the tendency is to purchase things in bulk. No one wants to discover that they are down to just one of anything - sad when it’s eggs or lunch meat, terrifying when it’s toilet paper. So that meant I was going to be carrying back three dozen eggs in two 18-packs.
I put them in my pannier bag with the old zip-neck fleece pullover I carry for temperature emergencies as padding. What I didn’t adequately prepare myself for was the change in perspective that occurred for the ride back.
Literally every bump, crack, frost heave, or other tarmac imperfection became locked into my visual radar, and each time I chose poorly - each time a bump smacked harder, more smartly than seemed ideal - I winced in sympathetic, anticipatory pain.
This also had the effect of slowing me down markedly. The wind was not against me, and my load wasn’t heavy - it’s two cartons of eggs, for goodness sake - and yet my average for the return trip dropped to something south of 10mph as I gingerly picked my way back across the prairie landscape.
When I got back to the garage I pulled out the cartons and contemplated opening them there to see how I’d done. However, I have a personal tendency towards tragic mishap when it comes to interacting with fragile and/or fluid containing items, and raw eggs, it seems to me, fit in both categories. As I considered it I could picture myself opening a carton, having carried it all the way home on my trike, and then unceremoniously dropping it’s contents on the garage floor.
Hell, I figured I was going to be fortunate to just not drop them while carrying them in to the house.
So I carefully picked them up - with both hands, just like Grandma Marie taught me - and took them inside. I set them firmly on the table, ensuring they were securely placed before I opened them. And:
There you have it. I suspect I was being a little over the top in my concern on the way home - I’ll be more comfortable next time. But I’ll still carry them in using both hands.