Biking it

This weekend we made a big step towards our cloggie acceptance. We bought (secondhand) bikes.

Buying a bike goes something like this: they are all expensive. Second hand or not. Adding locks to them makes them twice as expensive. We were advised to look on www.marktplaats.nl for the best deal, but - having looked on marktplaats and establishing that it's all in Dutch and we don't know what we're looking for anyway - we decided to actually let a saleman do the talking.

Our saleman was very patient - he found a bike for me to look at. "What you think?" he asked with a hint of pride. "It looks like a bike," I replied with confidence.

That's when he knew he was dealing with idiots (well, at least one idiot)

Having each settled on a bike, we then had to add the (second) locking mechanism. No bike is really safe with just one lock to crack. The second lock has to be long enough to stretch around the bike, the wheel, possibly the front wheel, a tree or metal pole, and a inbred alstation-cross-doberman.

Unfortunately, with so much coil to work with it took me longer to unlock the lock, unwrap it from my now-entangled left ankle, re-wrap it around the bike (keeping hands and knees out of the way), than it took us to get home. And it took us a while to get home, because I refused to actually ride my new bike. So we wound our weary way home with Mills cycling behind me, impatiently ringing his bell and chanting, "you have to get it on it eventually, you know..."

And I do know that. And I will. I'm at the library now and you know what... I took the bus.