Declaring that he has “had it” with road-hogging weekend bicycle riders in western Hanover, Doswell resident Luke Ford has declared war on the skinny spandex-clad athletes.
“Every time I round a corner in Hanover trying to get to the Ashland Feed store or some such place I have to weave around them damn scrawny bike riders, who pop up out of nowhere like clouds of mosquitos” (pronounced “MUS-kee-ters” by the native Hanovarian). “I tell ya, from now on Luke Ford will not be so careful around them!”
Many Hanover residents concur with the frustration voiced by Ford of the bicyclists. “I’m in my truck,” says Ford, “minding my own business, when here they come, sometimes a dozen or more, wearing their tight orange shorts and their sissy helmets and their teeny tiny bag lunches, and they’re all over the dang road. Last Saturday I spilled an entire cup of hot coffee in my lap when they shot past me on both sides!”
“It’s unnervin’, like goin’ the wrong way in a NASCAR race.” He added, “Only instead of NASCAR vehicles its very expensive, dainty 15-speed bikes, ridden by anorexic weekend athletes.”
Ford said he doesn’t need to remind the bicyclists of the mobile home incident of 2003, when over twenty of the stick-thin cyclists, going over 25 mph, rounded a corner on Teman Road and encountered Beaverdam man Rollie Gathright, who had the entire road temporarily blocked as he backed a mobile home into a tight clearing.
“They splattered like bugs on a windshield” against the side of the mobile home, according to Gathright. Many of the cyclists that day had to be carried to Teresa Thomas Medical Center for treatment and missed their usual end-of-ride gathering at Ashland Coffee and Tea.
“And that’s another thing,” Ford gripes, “The way they sit out front of that coffee shop, all smug and sweaty and helmet-headed, goin’ on and on about their quads and their glutes and their hammys, like they own the place. Hell, they think they own the road too! My patience is at an end! Them bicyclists gonna watch out for Luke Ford from here on out!”
