Saturday, June 02, 2012

Widow Maker

Can you see how lethal this thing is? Can you spot the hidden danger?


I know, the idea of a bike trailer always made me nervous. I'm not the best on a bike to begin with:

Only I can make a quiet bike ride and a tree into an 'extreme sport'.
LK was adamant though. When the girls were small, he wanted us to be able to go on family bike rides down to the beach, and he would tow them in the bike trailer.

I thought it would be a bit like those mothers you see with pushchairs thoughtlessly flinging their children out in to moving traffic before they'd even stepped off the curb. I thought cars wouldn't see the trailer, that my two tiny daughters would be hurtling along in an aluminium and canvas frame below eye-level of even the tiniest European car.

I was wrong. The bike trailer worked a treat and no-one hit us. Unfortunately the girls HATED it. Strapping the two of them together in such close proximity to each other, both wearing over-sized mushroom-like helmets was a disaster. I've searched our photo library looking for a photo of the two of them in it - but it doesn't exist because there was never a point where one or both of them wasn't screaming.

So the bike trailer sat unused by the side of our house. Until I decided it was more than time that we sold it in a garage sale.

Who would have thought that would be the dangerous part of the whole exercise?

Look who had made a comfy new home in our bike trailer:


A massive black widow spider.

OMFG.

Preventing my curious, scientifically-minded 6 year old from 'taking a closer look' was hard. Persuading them both to go inside while I - no spider-lover myself - disposed of it was another thing. Taking the time to get a photo, convinced it was going to lunge at any minute (they do not really lunge - or do they??) was testament to how badly I need blog content dear readers.

Eventually I 'guided' it with a trowel in to a huge jug of water (to slow it down and/or drown it). Keeping my eye on it, doing the front crawl around its watery prison, I carried it as far away from our house as possible.

I know they're everywhere over here, but to think one had been living where we were strapping our kids down (albeit a few years ago) just gives me the willies.

Yuck.

6 comments:

Tom Raggett said...

OMG. well handled.

Anonymous said...

As a Midwesterner living in California, I too am freaked out by black widows. Ugh! I haven't actually seen one yet, but my neighbors are always finding them in their yards, so I'm sure it won't be long. They just look disgusting!!

AliBlahBlah said...

Thank you! Yes, ugh is the word. I hate spiders, so I'm really thankful it didn't bolt. Actually, black widows are very shy and this one wasn't showing any signs of doing anything other than wanting to crawl back under its leaf, but that doesn't make quite such a good story does it?!

MsCaroline said...

We had one of those bike trailers, and Son#1 loved tooling around behind Daddy - until Son#2 came along and (in his mind, I'm sure) ruined everything. We ended up selling it at a garage sale before we moved to Arizona, which is a good thing, since I'm sure it would just have ended up being inhabited by scorpions...

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