Flying Zega Pannier Lids

I owe a big apology to drivers on highway 440 in Raleigh and Cary, North Carolina on December 16th. I am so so sorry that I didn't lock down my pannier lids (I thought I had!) - they vibrated off, and probably scared the bejeezus out you when your car ran over them. What's even more frightening is that I lost them in two separate trips, one flew off going to work, the other flew off coming back from work. When I got to work and saw the right lid was missing, I wanted to curl up and die because I remembered that I didn't check it before I left work. It gets worse. When I got home, I hallucinated the left pannier lid in place; it wasn't until I came downstairs to the garage on Saturday morning and noticed that the pannier lid was missing.

My sister, my long-suffering sister, told me that over her dead body was I going to look for the panniers on the highway by myself. She was going to drive the car, I would look, and please put on this high res yellow nylon bicycling jacket so that I wouldn't get run over when I dash out onto the highway to retrieve the lids. It was much easier to do it her way. We retrieved the first lid less than a mile from home on the inside median, before I would have achieved highway speed. The second lid was about a mile from work, on the highway on the outside lane.

Here's what pristine Zega cases look like.

Here's what the lids look like now.

You can see from the pictures that they both got run over and the brackets have been punched through. Maybe you could have pounded them out, re-sealed the holes around the brackets and filed down all the sharp edges but I decided to get new ones.

My sister reminded me that she is the zip tie queen - she has canisters of zip ties in every length and every color - why not zip tie the lids shut? Well, that would mean using up to four zip ties a day - I can't waste that much plastic. I bought the try-to-save-the-idiot-from-herself lid guards - they are just velcro straps that will keep the lids from dropping to the ground.

Hopefully the shame (and expense) of having lost both lids will make me hyper-vigilant in the future.

The smashed up lids will not go to waste. My brother-in-law immediately asked for the them - he'll re-use the aluminum for his many building projects.

Oh, the shame.