Towing Extravaganza

My brother in law and sister in law (referred to by name in the rest of the blog) just bought a new car because their Suzuki broke. They had driven it to the parents house and wanted to tow it to my house to store it and do the repairs (eventually). They had asked me to tow it with my van, mostly because that is how we got our mustang here (wow, that makes it sound like we have a lot of cars here,..... OK we do!). The only tow strap we had on us was a 6 foot rope and it took a full foot to try to hook it to my van, which does not have a tow package on it or anything close to it. So, here I am driving along in the van with john in the Suzuki, 5 feet behind me! And katie following behind him. It was a normal towing experience (which means my heart was racing trying to anticipate any problems and lead the way, I hate making decisions that might come back to bite me) until we reached the four way stop. I will type my point of view and you will need to check john and katie's blog to read their side. I am driving and see the stop sign coming. I started slowing down really early like I would for a light just in case it changed or to save having to stop completely. And I realize the we are 30 feet from the stop sign going 5 miles an hour. That was probably unnecessary! So I get to the stop sign and allow pretty much every one to go before I do. I SLOWLY start moving forward, mostly to avoid whiplash from the tow rope not being tight,and I notice a biker on my left in the lane coming up to the stop sign, and I thought " he has to stop just like a car if he is driving on the road", so I keep slowly moving forward. And then I see him steering his bike to go around the van and I hear john honking his horn over and over again. Now, one of the rules we set down is that if john honks, I need to stop. So I stopped the very slowly moving van. The next thing I see is the biker try to cut through me and john. OK, that is like 5 feet first off, does he normally cut in between cars that are only 5 feet apart with his bike? And then I remember the TOW ROPE! Now, I had my hazard lights on, my regular lights on and john had both on as well, why that biker didn't see it is beyond me. Next, thing I see is the bike and the biker in the air! Apparently he had clothes lined himself. OH MY GOSH! Immediately john and roll down our window and ask him if he is OK, and all he did was pick up his bike and ride off. I guess he felt pretty dumb at that point, I would. I 'm sure that the cars stopped and the stop sign would think john had hit the biker right up until we drove past with the tow rope in between us! 5 minutes later we got to my house and we all got out of our cars laughing and saying " can you believe that!" It made our day! I hadn't laughed that hard in awhile! Bike carefully please! Or you might feel really dumb! :)