This is about my bike. It’s the only one I got. It dates to 1995 and it is / was my niece’s. It was lying, forgotten, in the basement until I started reading about bicycle touring. This at about the same time that my children began to ride their first "real" bikes, so to speak, and started demanding that I ride with them. I hadn’t ridden in about 15 years -- which did great things for my sore bottom on the first outings -- but what doesn’t one do for family?
So I don’t know how I ended up reading about bike touring or how any of this connects to bike touring or to what I may want to do with my bike: the purple pig. (I only remember not too long ago some guy struggling up a hill fully loaded with bags front and back on his bike. He was smiling in between puffs so that scene stuck in my mind. My obsessions start like that: with a scene that recurs happily over and over again…with that touch of masochism.)
Well the kids want to ride but I realize I haven’t put air on a tire in so many years and the pig's tires are flat. And I guess we’ll also need helmets and water bottles and hundred other things one may need to ride safely and comfortably. My children are only seven and eight (the third one three months, so no helmet for him!) So I do need to worry about safety and things careful. But I don’t know anything about this, this bike business. So I turn to Phred Org somehow and find they have this wonderful list were people talk everything you want to know about bike touring. If you want to know something you ask, they tell you. Good enough for me and so I embark. I suppose my first post there was “The Purple Pig” or something to that effect about my inane difficulties in getting my bike back into shape; sort of like bringing it back to life from the recesses of Hades. The kids bikes are new but mine isn’t and I’m the sort of fellow who doesn’t buy new things when old things are around that may just as well do the job. Indeed, perhaps foolishly idealistic, but what the hell.
Little did I know. Hence, the purple pig.
So I don’t know how I ended up reading about bike touring or how any of this connects to bike touring or to what I may want to do with my bike: the purple pig. (I only remember not too long ago some guy struggling up a hill fully loaded with bags front and back on his bike. He was smiling in between puffs so that scene stuck in my mind. My obsessions start like that: with a scene that recurs happily over and over again…with that touch of masochism.)
Well the kids want to ride but I realize I haven’t put air on a tire in so many years and the pig's tires are flat. And I guess we’ll also need helmets and water bottles and hundred other things one may need to ride safely and comfortably. My children are only seven and eight (the third one three months, so no helmet for him!) So I do need to worry about safety and things careful. But I don’t know anything about this, this bike business. So I turn to Phred Org somehow and find they have this wonderful list were people talk everything you want to know about bike touring. If you want to know something you ask, they tell you. Good enough for me and so I embark. I suppose my first post there was “The Purple Pig” or something to that effect about my inane difficulties in getting my bike back into shape; sort of like bringing it back to life from the recesses of Hades. The kids bikes are new but mine isn’t and I’m the sort of fellow who doesn’t buy new things when old things are around that may just as well do the job. Indeed, perhaps foolishly idealistic, but what the hell.
Little did I know. Hence, the purple pig.
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