Adventures in grocery shopping by bicycle

It'll be so European...
This is what I thought when I hopped on my bike last week and headed to the grocery story a mile or so away from my new home. When I moved to Holland, MI from the northern part of the state, one of the things that I was looking forward to was riding my bike more. Holland has bike paths everywhere, while the road that my old house faced didn't even have a shoulder.
So I packed up my shopping bag and put a few dollars in my pocket, and headed to the grocery store to get some produce to go with that evening's dinner. Things began to fall apart after I came out of the store and loaded my purchases into the bike basket. My combination cable wouldn't come unlocked. I'd had that moment of "maybe I should test this first" when I had locked the bike up; I couldn't remember the last time I had actually used the cable. But I hadn't tested it. I had just hoped for the best. Now I couldn't get my bike free, even after trying the lock a dozen times, and enduring the stares of people who thought I might be doing something untoward, like stealing it.
After a hot and dusty walk home, and waiting for my husband to come home from work, we returned to the store to "steal" my bike back. His tin snips did the job on the cable, and my bike was free. I felt rather silly, getting locked off of my bike.

Today, I redeemed myself. With a new lock coiled around the frame of my bike, I took off for the Holland Farmers' Market this morning. It was a mostly flat, uneventful ride, only made challenging by the wierd barriers the Padnos metal recycling plant has placed near all of their driveways, which form a little obstacle course/maze for people walking or on bikes. I guess they're to keep people from driving on the sidewalks, but really, who does that?
At the market, I tempted fate and bought a dozen brown speckly eggs, in addition to a pint of blueberries and a little box of raspberries. A quart of green beans filled the rest of the space left in my bike basket. As I unlocked my bike and wheeled it back from the bike rack, I had visions of spilled berries and cracked eggs on the road if I took a tumble. But luckily, it seemed that I had used up all my bad luck on my previous outing.  As I rode home, I thought that what I really needed was one of the gorgeous boquets of sunflowers I had seen, sticking out of the top of my basket. That would have been just lovely. Instead, I settled for the satisfaction of making it back home, with my bike, all in the same trip, and not cracking an egg or spilling even one berry.