Lightning McQueen; found on the roadside

I have found a number of unusual and quirky objects while out riding my bike. Chuck the rubber chicken was a roadside find. As was Alison the rubber alligator. And Frosty the Pez Dispenser snowman. My latest find is a cast aluminum four-wheel-drive Lightning McQueen toy from the Disney movie Cars.

I found him on my local Saturday morning ride - a 60-mile flat and fast group run through the rural area South and West of my home in Avondale, Arizona. I was riding near the front of the group and at first, Lightning McQueen was just an object to avoid and call out to the riders behind me. All I saw was a set of chubby plastic wheels on what was obviously a small toy car laying upside down on the shoulder of the road. But because I love to find objects like this on a ride, I couldn't help but think about the toy after we passed. I wondered if it would still be there when I ride back by on my way home.

I had an off-day on the bike so took the short route option (cutting off the last 20 miles). I was with a small group so I couldn't stop to grab McQueen as we passed but as soon as I made it back to my car at LifeTime Fitness, I drove back and picked him.

I was happy with the find. He's a colorful addition to my collection of things found on rides. Except for a nasty scar along the driver's side of the hood and roof, he is unscathed enough to look new.

Part of the joy of finding these objects is imagining their story, what sequence of events led to the random chance coming together of this object and a 45 year-old recreational road cyclist out for a training ride. How did Lightning McQueen come to be laying upside down on the shoulder of the Southbound land of Bullard Avenue, 100 meters North of Yuma Road in Avondale, Arizona and five minutes past 7am on Saturday, April 12, 2013?

I imagine that he's been there all night, left there sometime after the sun went down Friday evening. Imagine that Lightning McQueen was a birthday gift-bag item for a seven-year-old boy's party held the previous weekend (he's too expensive to be a fast-food giveaway and maybe not quite big and expensive enough to me a directly-bought toy for a child). McQueen was left in his family's car by it's young owner and the owner's mother, driving home from the 7pm Zumba class at LifeTime, handed the toy to her 30-month-old daughter who was fussing and needed something to keep her occupied for the twenty-minute drive home.

It's a nice evening, not so warm as to need air conditioning and not too cool to leave the windows down. The rear passenger window is down half way. The child continues to fuss and manages to throw Lightning McQueen into the space between the two front seats. The mother, who is alone in the car with the child, manages to hand it back awkwardly to her daughter (who is sitting in the right-hand side of the bench seat in a forward-facing car seat. The child wants her mother's attention, or food, or wants to express displeasure at being trapped in the car seat, so she throws a mini fit and flings the toy out the window. Lightning McQueen travels from the grubby hand of a 30-month old into the cool, fresh night air, scuttles along the hard asphalt first on its hood and roof, then tumbles the last twenty feet, ultimately coming to rest safely off the side of the travel lane. He sits there, upside down, and until our large group of cyclists pass it by the next morning, he is undisturbed.

I also imagine that before he was purchased to be included in a gift bag at a 'Cars' themed party for second-graders, he sat on a shelf at Toys R Us. He got there in a box with 48 other Lightning McQueen's just like him, in the back of a semi-truck trailer from a distribution center to the store. He traveled inside that box with his siblings by rail in a shipping container from the port at Long Beach, where he was offloaded from a freighter that originated in China. He made it onto the ship in the container direct from a manufacturing facility thirty-five miles from the port of Shanghai. Before being placed in the box and into the shipping container, he was an assemblage of pieces and parts, some molded right there in the same facility, some brought in from other manufacturers in the region.  The raw materials to make those components were all sourced in China.

So from aluminum ore dug out of a Chinese mountain, to a smelter, to a mold, to an assembly and finishing plant, into packaging, into a box, into a container onto a railway car, onto a ship, onto another railway car, into a distribution center, into the trailer of an American cross-country semi-truck, onto a shelf at Toys R Us, into a gift bag at a second-grade American boy's birthday party, into the home and car of a local second-grader, into the hands of their younger sister, out the window of their mini-van onto the side of Bullard Avenue in Avondale, Arizona and into my hands, that is Lightning McQueen's story.

What have you found on a bike ride? And what is its story?