Daniel R.

There is a great parking lot right next to the trail and at this early morning hour it was mostly empty. I found a spot and proceeded to get ready. I had placed my skates on the passenger side and figured it would be best to put them on from that side. I hit the door lock/unlock button, got out, closed the driver side door and walked around to the passenger side. Huh, the door is locked. Oh I thought, this must be like the remote door unlock where you need to hit it twice to unlock the passenger side door. Back around to the driver's side. Huh, that door is locked too.

I'm sure given the detail thus far you can guess the outcome. The important piece in this story is that after turning off the car I put my car keys into my camel back so I wouldn't have them in my pocket as I was blading. Net result, they weren't with me when I stepped out of the car. A side note is that I can probably count the number of times I've actually used the lock/unlock button on my car using just my fingers. I even remember explicitly looking at the lock on the door after hitting the button and thinking, oh that's in the right position. I thought wrong.

All was not lost, I still had my wallet on me. There is a pecking order with things I really hate to be without. My wallet is at the top. Next would be my mobile phone. The house keys and lastly car keys. I'm sure I could ramble on a lot about why that order exists, but I'm going to pass on that digression for the time being. Needless to say, having my wallet I had options. I chose the walk home one. My intent was to enjoy the weather and get some exercise, I figured the walk home would be as nice as the blade I had been planning. It's at least a good 4 miles from Arlington Center back to my house. That's a long way to speed walk in sandals.

Granted I have ran a couple miles in my sandals, today's walk didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. I made it back fine, but ended up with a couple of blisters on my feet. A quick ride back from a housemate with my spare set of keys and everything was back to "normal". No permanent damage and a little bit of humility thrown in.