No riding last week due to travel for work and SNOW! So I took this time to find another bike that would work better than the fat guy fancy bike. I need a bike with fenders, cross tires and few or no gears at all. And because of the potential for theft and the probability of getting flattened by a taxi in Little Mogadishu. I'm looking for an inexpensive ride.
Now begins the search for a bike or parts. Drew and I go over to One On One bikes to look through the beaters they keep down in their basement. What happens next is pretty weird. The basement is a sea of parts, piles of frames and old beater bikes. Thinking I hit the mother load, I roll up the sleeves and say to Drew, "We have a man's work ahead of us today, buddy". Then this old dude appears out of some hole in the wall, I believe it is his hermit cave, and starts an unpleasant conversation full of non sequiturs and profane stories about strippers from Sex World next door. I didn't mind the stripper stories, but it just gets weirder.
I spot some Bianchi frames which he advises me are off limits. He is planning on welding them together... "This one time I welded a shopping cart to the front of a bike... That little stripper would ride in the front..." Dude, can you focus for a minute? So I move to the next section of old beaters. These apparently are off limits too. I'm not sure why because he starts telling us about what he did to this old racer from Belgium, back in Eddy Merckx's day, then breaks off into a story about, you guessed it, a stripper. The only sections left are the real expensive rebuilds and a pile of twisted metal that looks like a rack of bikes that went through a tornado. I don't want to ask, I'm sure half of a stripper story will come out. So we decide to leave. Easier said than done. First we have to hear about his buddy and this woman he married and how the old dude renovated their house.
The search continues.
Hee-hee
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