Bicycle! Bicycle!

So, as you might be able to tell from the title, I like Queen.  And I got a new bike. 

The story of the bike's purchase is mildly comical and possibly worthy of one of those heartwarming commercials shown during Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. 

Now, you might be able to relate to this if you are married to a man, dating a man, know a man, are the daughter of a man, or are a man yourself.  Sometimes, and I'm just saying occasionally, there is a task you want a man to complete and you just can't quite get him to ever do it. 

So, in this story my husband has a pickup truck, and it is a stick-shift, and I don't know how to drive a stick-shift.  (I realize I'm going to come out sounding a little bit pathetic and helpless, because why couldn't I just learn to drive a stick-shift, but as you'll see from my bicycle story, powering heavy vehicles is not my strong suit, and everybody on the road is better off if I never learn to drive a stick.) 

Anyway, I kept asking my husband to go to Target with me to by a bike, because I needed to buy it before May 1 when my 10% certificate expired.  Eventually I just gave up on him and decided to just get the bike myself.  I was going to put a fully-assembled bicycle in my Toyota Corolla. 

And then I got the bike, and I was standing out in the parking lot like a dumbass, trying to find some configuration that would work so I wouldn't have to drive home with the backseat door open, when some random stranger with an SUV offered to throw the bike in the back of her car and follow me home. 

I was beyond embarrassed.  And grateful.  And thinking this woman was the best human ever, except on the way home I saw in my rearview mirror that she was lighting up a cigarette, and that tarnished my image of her just a little.  Don't smoke, people.  It's gross. 

But the woman didn't steal the bike, and made it to my house and unloaded it for me, and like a pathetic fool I just gave her one of the three containers of strawberries that I had just bought at Target. 

So, now I had a bike!  And it was the perfect weather day to go out for a ride!  My mom took this picture of Nathan and me:

 

You can't see it, but the bike is a very pretty lavender that kind of matches my shirt.  

Anyway, this is the first new bike I have gotten since I was 10.  The reason behind my lack of bikes is, I kind of always hated bikes.  As a kid I just didn't take to bike-riding.  I remember a conversation in second grade where I embarrassingly realized that I was the only kid who still had training wheels.  I was always crashing into cars and bushes because I just couldn't get the balance thing right.  

I was never one of those kids who liked riding bikes all around the neighborhood.  While most kids used their bikes to get to exotic far-off destinations like the grocery store, I preferred to walk.  And then I went to a college that was like Bike Central.  Everyone had a bike, but I found bike ownership to be too fraught with potential theft, maintenance, accidents, and sweating.  Again, I preferred to walk, learning to stop at bike "crosswalks" and wait until it was clear because bikes had the right-of-way.  When I moved too far off-campus to reasonably walk all the time, I took the bus to school.  

Even as an adult, I never opted for group bike rides.  Why would anybody think that was fun?  Plus, when Nathan was teeny-tiny, I never felt confident enough in my bike-riding to put him in any type of bike child-carrier.  Oh and also I live in a climate where you would freeze your ass off riding a bike 6 months out of the year, which means a bike would be yet another item taking up space in my garage most of the time.  

But, in the last year, my attitudes on bike ownership have changed.  For one thing, Nathan got a bike for his fourth birthday, so now I know he can power his own bike rather than having to ride in mine.  Also, I started taking Spin at the gym, so I became a little more confident in my bike-riding endurance.  And finally, I started having delusions of completing an outdoor triathlon, so I needed to get a bike. 

I was not confident that I'd remember how to ride a bike.  I know there's that saying, "like riding a bicycle," which refers to skills that will always come right back to you, no matter how long it has been since you practiced them.  But I was pretty sure that if anybody was going to be the exception to that rule, it would be me.  In fact, in an attempt to test out the bike in the Target store, I crashed (at a very slow speed) right into an endcap.  But it turned out that foible was due to low air in the tires, and when I got home and pumped it up with the Inflatron-2000 electric pump (seriously, it's called something like that), I found I could ride the bike like I'd been riding nonstop since I was a kid. 

And I'm pretty sure I was on the advanced course of bike-riding, too, because when you ride with a little kid, you're forever having to stop, which requires some major balance tactics.  Oh, I should also mention that this bike has 27 speeds, which is 22 speeds more than the bike I owned when I was 10.  I had absolutely no recollection of whether you should go to a higher-numbered speed while going uphill or a lower-numbered speed.  Fortunately since I was 10 I have also learned how to drive a car, and I recalled on my (automatic) car that you could switch to 2nd gear if you're going down a hill, and since 2nd gear is higher than 1st gear, I realized that higher-gear equals slowing you down.  So anyway, I turned my bike up to a really high gear so I could go slowly to keep up with Nathan, which is a problem on the bike path in the park behind my house, because parts of it are uphill, and also sometimes I had to ride on the grass.  So, I was sweating.  And my butt hurt.  

But, seriously, it was so much fun.  And after I went out and rode bikes with Nathan, I was way less frustrated with him than I normally am.  I was like, Yay my kid!  Yay bikes! 

So, I'm very excited about my bike.  I just want to ride it all the time.  And today I'm going to ride on a bike path in town (by myself) instead of going to the gym.  Exercising outside!  Yay!