Pay no mind to my bluish face, the bigger concern was our barely-survived fender-bonker.

We make our requests with volume, and I don't mean strictly that there were more of us than there were parents, but also that we did so as loudly as possible. We see Hot Wheels cars, candy, chips, sugared cereals and a wide variety of inappropriate and undesirable products that have attractive packaging. Technically, us drivers should be paying attention to the safety of our driving, but when marketing takes over, this is honestly all we can be expected to do.

Karting is a fairly new sport, with some lightweight vehicles having as much as ten or twenty horsepower. These figures mean nothing to me, but it suggests that they are impressive somehow since the data does exist. Since an '82 Honda Civic only had 85 horsepower, and it was a 5-seat car, it does seem like quite a lot, but is it safe?

Worrywart parents have suggested that it is dangerous beyond dangerous, despite being fun beyond fun. If you're going to sport a motor-driven kart, you should always wear a helmet and other protective gear, but we learned the much-too-hard way that even if you're only driven by a single parent-power motor, you're not entirely insulated from the risks of an un-cool collision.

We were near the dairy neighborhood, pulling up to park in front of the drive-through bologna section, when everything went south.

We pulled up and stopped, and next thing we know, without any prior warning, we smacked fenders with another shopping cart. Conveniently (or inconveniently, not sure which) the other vehicle was driven by my brother Patrick.

I asked him where he thought he was going and why he didn't hit the brakes, but he just said that his steering wheel didn't work and that he didn't have a brake pedal. As it turned out, the vehicle I was co-driving with my junior brother/journalist Dominic suffered the same shortcomings, but I wasn't about to admit it. I know better than that, so I just let him agree that it was his fault that we'd suffered our accident.

Though I haven't ruled out that my neck might be rip-rashed, whatever that litigious stuff is all about. I know it's furry/fuzzy, and hurts if you poke it hard enough, so maybe that's worth a couple cool million, I suspect.

We exchanged names by telling each other what our names were, and we all laughed about it. Then we exchanged our conspicuous lackings of insurance information, in part because we didn't have it, but mostly because we don't even know what it is, and then we pushed our carts apart only to see that there was no damage.

We got lucky.

Our fender-bonker was nothing more than that; we bonked fenders.

Our necks and limbs are all okay, and we were only shaken to tiny degrees that were quickly forgotten. This makes us statistics in the greater scheme of things, but we could have just as easily been the other kind of statistic, the kind that isn't very good to be.

If you drive or ride in a shopping cart, consider checking it out for safety purposes before riding in it. We weren't buckled, so I hopped out while we were walking down aisle-9 and almost fell over. It isn't always easy and it isn't always as safe as living in a vacuum, but sometimes you have to go outside your sphere of comfort and try something new and worthwhile, because sometimes you never know; it may be a lot of fun, of course, sometimes you do know, and it is a lot of fun.

Above - We exchanged names, but not phone number (because we don't know them) nor insurance information (because we were all uninsured). In the end, the damage was minimal, so we decided to just go our seperate (though togethersome) ways and pretend it never even happened. Go ahead and ask any of us and we'll all tell you with authority, we don't even remember if it happened.