Unbelievable...

For the last year or so, I have had some bad luck with bikes.

There was the really, really nice one that my Dad bought me, which was stolen last Memorial Day weekend.

Then, there was the jalopy that I pieced together from parts and pieces of various dead bicycles that were left behind the apartment complex where we live. I figured it was such a piece of junk that nobody would ever think to steal it.

I mean, I was riding it down the street once, sitting up, with no hands... and the BIKE SEAT fell off, landing me right on the back wheel and then flat on my face. The bolt that held the seat on had sheared off completely. Surely enough, that one walked off too.

So, we poked around Craigslist and found an awesome, inexpensive old 10-speed road bike. We picked it up and I LOVED it. I love the adrenalin rush that you get from something that is made to go so quickly in such an effortless way. In short fashion, that one got stolen too.

Which puts us in about September of last year. 4 months, 3 bikes later. I finally learned my lesson. It wasn't enough to lock things outside. It wasn't enough to just leave a bike outside *just for a second* (no, seriously) while I ran upstairs.

Finally we wised up, and I now keep my bike inside. Locked. Inside. I have plans to put a bolt into a stud in the wall and physically chain my bike to the wall. Until that happens, I keep my bike in closer proximity.

All of this brings me back to my main - unbelievable - point. Last week, we were working in the garden planting tomatoes. Well, Hannah and I were planting things. The kids were doing a good job digging things up. Suddenly, I see a guy walk by, wheeling a KHS soft-tail mountain bike.

"Huh," I said to myself, "That looks an awful lot like my old (nice) bike. How many KHS bikes are there going to be around here... No bike shops carry them." I think my mental filter was off because of the physical labor of the gardening, and I spurted out "Hey man, nice bike... I used to have one just like it, same color & everything... but some jerk stole it."

After a little bit of chit-chat, I asked if I could see the bike a bit closer. Curiously, it just happened to have the same click-in clipless pedals that my old one had. It even had a "Performance" sticker and "Performance" water-bottle cage. Performance, for those of you who probably don't know, is a bike shop that doesn't exist in Utah. It does have locations in California, though.

This bike had a dented back wheel, just like the one I dented trying to jump down a huge flight of stairs at BYU-Idaho. One of the shifters was a bit screwy, just like the bike that had been stolen from me.

IT WAS MY BIKE!

After a short period of freaking out, and a period of time resisting the urge to rip the guy's head off, (He was just as surprised as I was... he bought it from a friend who picked it up from a local pawn shop sometime last year,) I offered to buy it from him.

And he agreed!

I got my bike back! Heck. Yeah.!