Bike's Don't Bounce :(

We completed our first leg of the trip to St. Louis on Friday, we arrived at my cousin's apartment with the car and trailer, and feeling pretty good! We didn't hit much traffic at all, and pretty much had zero problems. The trailers hubs were a little warmer then Aaron would have wanted but he had just repacked the bearings so... we weren't too concerned.

After finding a parking spot at the apartment complex we parked the "race rig" and did a quick once over, we noticed that the licence plate bracket on the back of the trailer had suffered some damage, we didn't know how that was possible.. till we realized THE BIKES AND RACK WERE MISSING!!! EEK.

We'd driven through a little bit of a sketchy area and our hearts fell at the thought of our bikes having got run over by someone/something and having caused damage to someone else's car :(

My cousin and Aaron went to retrace our steps and see if the bikes were anywhere along the way... we didn't have much hope as we couldn't recall WHERE we may have dropped them, and we knew parts of the area we drove through were super sketchy.

I was pretty bummed as a knew the bikes weren't cheap, and I knew we would want them at the site at Nationals and just the fact that we were NOT starting out on a good note.

I got a call about 10 minutes later, saying the bikes had been salvaged!!!
They had undergone some damage but there were ok, and didn't look like it caused any other cars an issue, someone had picked them up and moved them over to the side of the road! We were SO lucky.

We got them back, realized the bike rack was broken, probably from the fall off the trunk, and we had sustained a bent rim, and some other minor road rash but we had them!!!

We think the bike rack straps just became loose as we were going along, and then when we got off the highway they bounced off! :(

We had decided we're going to give up our own personal space within the car and just lay the bikes across the back seat. It's better for our piece of mind since we learned... Bikes Don't Bounce.