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Notes -
It was! There's something fun about inflating the tires, adjusting the brakes and shifters, lubricating everything, and getting an old bike out on the road. It's like an easier lower stakes version of the barn find car. It was also the best education in bike brands for me, virtually every house around me has a bike in the garage, 90% of them are trash that the owner thinks is a really high end bike and the other 10% are really expensive bikes that the owner thinks is just old trash.
It's amazing how quickly one finds oneself wanting all kinds of specialized varieties of bike, while simultaneously secure in the knowledge that others are doing more with less.
I find myself riding on public roads much more than I thought I would. I had a vision or stereotype in my mind that this was fairly dangerous, but upon really thinking about it and doing it more, I just need to be choosy about time and route and I can avoid most traffic pretty easily, make no left turns at speed, and have minimal problems. Route A is good for weekday evenings with minimal traffic after 6pm but bad during the day, Route B is through a neighborhood and good during the workday but terrible at rush hour, Route C runs through an industrial park and is perfect and completely empty on weekends but impossible on weekdays.
It's interesting, to me, how riding a bike changed my interaction with roads and traffic relative to walking the dog, going for a run, driving for utilitarian and recreational reasons. Hills are fairly irrelevant to driving, annoying but ultimately meaningless outside of split time for running, a major obstacle for a bicycle requiring serious route planning. As I walk or run on the left hand side facing traffic, turning left is the inside lane, and anyway crossing traffic is no big deal anywhere I go for a run. On a bike, I really try to avoid left turns unless it's at a stop sign, as that presents the worst risk of a car coming up behind me hitting me while trying to pass. Going for a run, if I need to stop and rest or walk for a bit after a hard effort or halfway up a hill, it doesn't matter and no one cares. When I fail on a hill climb on a bike, I feel like a public failure walking my bike up the hill, like wow I really suck at biking, and occasionally even get motorists slowing down to ask if I'm ok or if the bike broke down.
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