Disclaimer: If you’re a blogosphere friend — who shall remain unnamed — who’s going to write and say “I told you so” about my boys in Crocs, you don’t need to say anything here. My boys will continue to wear Crocs, just not on day trips into big cities involving escalators! 🙂

Escalators really do eat Crocs.

And here’s our proof:

That’s Timmy’s right-foot NC State Croc. This was on the down escalator near the Blue/Orange line platform at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station in D.C. I’m standing at the bottom of the escalator looking up.

I’d heard about this before. Merely Google “Crocs Escalators” and you’ll see all sorts of stuff. I was aware of this before — I typically make a point for my kids to stand in the center of the escalator no matter what shoes they’re wearing. Even in regular shoes or sandals, there’s a risk of injury. I’m aware of that. It’s so rare that we’re on escalators, I didn’t give much thought to the boys NOT wearing their Crocs on our trip into Washington, D.C. just because of the escalators.

But on this particular escalator we were consistently getting shoved out of the way by folks wanting to walk up and down the escalator steps. So I had Timmy way over on our right to keep him out of the way.

Suddenly Timmy’s stepping back and our escalator was grinding to a halt. Timmy had yanked his foot out of the shoe, evidenced by the broken strap on the right side, and he seemed fine.

There were all these people on the escalator when it stopped. They merely walked down the now-stationary steps and continued towards the train platform.

I after quickly whisking Timmy out of the way and checking his feet — having him wiggle his toes — we decided to leave the shoe there and just get on the train. After we took our seats I had to count to ten a few times — I was pretty freaked at what a near-miss that was! Timmy was and still is fine. No tears, no nothing. He was pretty matter-of-fact about the whole thing…even about the loss of a shoe. This was at the end of our trip into the city, so it wasn’t hard for him to be carried from the train to the van for the ride home.

Are we going to sue the D.C. Metro? No. We chose to take the D.C. Metro, we chose to incur the risks that go with it.

Are we going to sue Crocs? No. Buying/wearing Crocs is our choice, and we choose to accept the risks that go with it.

Part of me wishes we could sue the people who saw what was going on and refused to acknowledge our existence, but there’s obviously nothing I could do about that. Dave tried to find someone to report the now-stopped escalator while I was checking Timmy, but he couldn’t find anyone to help out. He tried to pull out the shoe, to no avail.

Will my kids continue to wear Crocs? Most likely. I’ll definitely give more thought to the escalator-ness of our travels…for example, perhaps Crocs aren’t the best thing when we’re doing air travel, with the escalators in airports. But of course they’re all of ours’ shoes of choice for the beach, pool or boating.

In the meantime, since my boys will be spending time at the pool over the next couple days, Timmy is now the proud, happy owner of a new pair of Spiderman flip-flops!