so what-all did i buy?

for tonight's run, i took both panniers, empty. it was a test mission. removing them from my rack (a.k.a. 'carrier' -- the thing over the rear wheel) was completely effortless. no struggling, now grownup mad-words. easy.

i bought:

two 1/2-gallon cartons of oj
a gallon of milk
an 8-lb bag of ice
a green pepper
a plastic thingy of clover sprouts
6 or 8 roma tomatoes (hope there's no salmonella!)
a cucumber
two lemons
a head of garlic
two gi-normous portabello mushrooms
two 1-1/2-lb loaves of 7-grain bread
and two packages of multi-grain english muffins.

i could barely lift the panniers to get them out to my bike. as i headed out the door, i was thinking, "good thing my bike has wheels." even despite the large amount of stuff i bought, and the bags' enormous weight, one of them did have room to spare, even after i'd added my kryptonite lock and my cable & padlock.

getting the panniers onto the bike was a little trickier than removing them had been, but not because of the bags; it was just a balance issue. i'd bought a huge amount of heavy stuff, and had to attach the bags one at a time. a couple of grownup mad-words were spoken, but not bad. really not bad. you would not have believed how horrific my old panniers were. i should have replaced those the instant i had a chance. can't believe i never thought to do it before.

when i got on my bike (which i still managed to do by swinging my right leg up over the back of the saddle), i realized that it had been a seriously long time since i'd carried that kind of weight on the back wheel of my bike. moving slowly was pretty dicey. that much weight over the back wheel makes the front wheel quite squirrelly. so i sped up. when you're that weighed down, you really can't change direction very quickly. (this was a colossal experiment, remember. i plan to plan better in the future. we didn't even really need ice this run -- i just wanted to see if i could get it home before it melted. i could.) saratoga headed south from ogden had a fair number of cars at first; but the drivers made plenty of room for my red & yellow glory.

i got home fine. i probably expended more effort in doing so, but i didn't notice. once i got home, i wondered whether the weight of the bags would make any difference in how they would be to remove from the bike, but i needn't have worried. the mechanism worked as well as when they were empty. no hooks snagging on spokes, clothing, the rack, or anything.

i love 'my' new panniers.