Hydrated

What have you discovered in your bags that made you wince?

I just found a piece of swiss cheese in a ziploc bag that had gotten buried in my handlebar bag that has been living in there for about 3 or 4 weeks.

I was too afraid to open the bag and take a whiff.

Pig_Chaser

Most disturbing thing i've discovered in my pannier was a hole. I was preparing to fix a flat and was looking for my repair kit. All i found was a hole, very disturbing indeed.

thdave

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that my soup containter was wet when I went to get my soup out of my trunk bag. The containter lid had come off and there was split pea soup everywhere. ! My trunk bag was a mess--I had a lot of stuff in there, including rain gear and utensils.

genec

The allen wrenches that I had just bought another set of. Kind of a "oh that's where they were... " moment.

Flimflam

Mushed up banana, luckily already in a bag of its own, but it found itself down in the bottom of my backpack for a good while before I started to wonder why my bag had started smelling.

Cyclon

Some people pay good money for aged cheese.

same time

A co-worker of mine was admiring my messenger bag once, and he stuck his hand in the back outside pocket that I never use. He pulled out a mouse carcass. It was flat and brittle, like a piece of cardboard. My cat had probably chased it in there a long, long time before.

kraemer

I always find my cats toys in my bag and Im worried that will happen to me one day..

climbhoser

Found a bag of hardened gummy bears about 6 years old once...

CastIron

Bullet hole. Wasn't there when I put it on to go home, either.

solveg

You live near me!!!! Tell me you were on vacation somewhere!

BTW: I've uncovered a lot of twin cities people on BF lately, and I'm thinking of getting together a leisurely BF ride in the spring. You up for it?

Oh, wait... better tell me if it was your* gun that went off, first. Your avatar still* scares me to death.

ax0n

An empty coffee thermos.

CastIron

Solveg, I'm up for it, depending on scheduling, of course.

The bullet hole was never explained. I heard the bullets go by my head (it's a distinct sound) and estimated the range when I heard the shots. Never saw where they came from. Police were disinterested. I wasn't terribly alarmed. Just another random event. Third Ave Bridge over I-94 in MPLS. Google Street View has it.

Nothing to do with my avatar, however. I think the old buzzard has charm, myself.

Brian T

+1

Banzai

Rather more cavalier than I would be about an incident like that.

Itsjustb

Can you say "The Exorcist"?

At least the rain gear is easy to rinse off....

This was my answer only minus the "in a bag of its own". It took me a week of daily scrubbing to get the smell out. Yuck.

Neil_B

That my cable lock was missing. Fortunately, I discovered this when I was near a bike shop, not when I'd reached my work. Now I keep a spare cable lock at work, along with shoes and clothes.

ghettocruiser

A bunch of pointed tools and CO2 cylinders.

At the airport carry-on screening.

ax0n

Good call. I have a gigargantuanormous chain and lock I just leave slung on the rack at work. I lock up with something significantly punier when I'm ducking into a store or bank really quick. And +1 on having spare EVERYTHING at work. This includes a few patches, CO2 cyls, an inner tube, whole set of work clothes, etc. I never take my work shoes home, either. No point.

Note, that I got my gigargantuanormous chain and lock after a similar adventure to yours:

https://kc-bike.blogspot.com/2007/06/...t-all-way.html
https://kc-bike.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-has-lock.html

nekohime

Some may find this disturbing but I didn't--a black widow spider. She probably crawled into my bag from my friend's garage. I like spiders, even the venomous kind, so I just gently scooped her up with a piece of paper and deposited her in some bushes. I'm just glad she didn't decide to get all ornery and bite me.

Also, the usual--spilled tea thermos, squished sandwiches that appear days later and not when I was desperate with hunger and needed them, and Stephen Colbert's face on the cover of "I Am America (And So Can You!)"

Neil_B

She would have been ground under the heel of my cycling shoe had I found her.

ax0n

I don't mind spiders but venomous ones get destroyed. We have a genuine (Orkin-verified) brown recluse infestation at my apartment. Fortunately it's either been resolved or it's dormant for winter.

Neil_B

We get invaded by warmth-seeking wolf spiders every autumn. Ah, the joys of living in the country! A little spray takes care of them. It's a little annoying to see them running across the living room carpet. The first one at least has novelty value, but by the time I've seen seven of them in an evening, it gets on my nerves. That same evening I found one living in one of our aquariums....

Artkansas 

I discovered a black widow inbetween the spokes of my front wheel when I shipped my Hard Rock from California to Arkansas. Probably got into the box in my garage while my ex was waiting for me to get back from Iceland so she could send it to me. I would have let the spider go in California, but didn't want to be responsible for importing black widows into Arkansas. Shortly after that, my pod came from California and when I opened it up there were two spiders side by side right in front of the intersection of the two pod doors. I guess they were going for the sunlight leaking through. They weren't in the wheels of my American Eagle Nishiki which was in the pod.

Scariest thing found in my backpack though was a Zefal HPX pump. I had it with me going into jury duty and it really set the security guards into a panic. Even after I unscrewed it and disassembled it they wouldn't let me go in with it. I had to leave it with them.

I also went through a TSA inspection with 3 Mafac Tire Levers in my backpack. That disturbed the TSA. About 4 inches long, no sharp edges and they had already gone through two TSA inspections sucessfully in two days. But 3rd time was the charm. I was required to mail them back to myself if I wanted to get to Iceland.

solveg

That was what freaked me out when I got my place in KS. I was researching Brown Recluse, I found out that the average house in Kansas has an astronomical amount of them. I can't remember the number or find the original web page, but it was hundreds if not thousands.

And I'm never* going to Lenexa:

"When one finds a habitat that is conducive to recluse spider survival, no matter what the species, one does not find single specimens; one finds dozens of them. For example, a family of 4 in Lenexa, Kansas collected 2,055 brown recluse spiders in their house in 6 months. About 450 of these were large enough to cause envenomations, they saw brown recluses crawling all over the house, the walls, the carpet, in the sinks and bathtub, yet in 8 years of occupancy of that house (as of Sept 2004), no person or their multitude of pets has ever shown evidence of a bite (Vetter and Barger, Journal of Medical Entomology, volume 39, pages 948-951, 2002). " https://spiders.ucr.edu/necrotic.html