Neighbors to the Rescue!

Last night, something scary happened. My husband and I left in a hurry to run some errands and thought we had closed our garage door. Of course, not closing the garage door may not seem too terribly scary, but our garage faces an alley where no one can notice strangers coming or going. Our alley has a few people who roam up and down collecting cans and a guy who drives up and down collecting things made of metal. This is all fine in my book. But last night, as we drove down our alley and headed back to our garage, I realized we had left the garage door open!

My husbands first words out of his mouth were, “Our bikes are gone!” Gasp! I thought, “My bike is gone? What will I do? I love my bike.” My husband starting searching through his tool boxes to see if anything else was missing or had been touched. To our surprise, nothing else was missing. So, we assumed someone, or two people, quickly saw two bikes, hopped on them, and rode off into the setting sun. What a great Christmas present those bikes would have made! My first reaction was that I needed a new bike. Yes, this is silly, but two days a week a ride my bike to work. One day a week I ride my bike to school and avoid having to pay for parking. And many days a week I ride my bike to Starbucks. I needed a bike!

My husband thought it would be best to drive around the neighborhood and see if we could find the assalients. As we were driving off, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that our bikes were in our backyard. Our backyard? I hopped out of the car and raced through the garage door  into the backyard. Sure enough, there they were, safe and sound. Relieved and confused, we parked them safely back in the garage and closed the door.

While eating dinner, we discussed who could have put those bikes there. I initially thought it might have been our next door neighbors who had been pulling in to their garage as we were pulling out of ours. Maybe they had noticed we hadn’t closed the door and decided to be helpful. My husband thought it might be the nice old lady who walks her dog down our alley that wrangled the bikes into the yard. I couldn’t picture her doing this with her dog on the leash, our bikes are heavy and she is elderly.

Later that night, we listened to a voice message on our answering machine that solved the puzzle. Our neighbor, three doors down who frequently hangs out in his garage, left us a message explaining the whole scenario. The elderly dog walking lady noticed our garage door was open. Not being able to figure out how to close the garage door herself (she would have had to push the button and run to beat the door), she talked our neighbor into moving the bikes into our backyard. He also couldn’t figure out how to close the garage door from the inside, had left it open and looked up our phone number to leave us a message (this is a neighbor who lives behind our house, so we are really alley neighbors.)

Thank goodness for friendly neighbors! I would hate to have to find a new bike or go without one for a while. It has become my second mode of transportation and I love riding.