In Which I Find Where Cheap Beast Bikes Go To Die

Bike lock at apartment complex locking nothing to the rack.

I've noticed before that bike racks near dorms at Iowa State University are a bit, well, chaotic, with many abandoned bikes accumulating.

They seem to run to inexpensive mountain bikes, like The Beast. I suppose if you had a nice road bike, you’d be unlikely to be taking it to ISU or parking it outside, for that matter.

Friday, we moved Ben back to college. He’s in graduate school now at ISU and lives in an apartment complex near the campus. And it seems the such complexes have racks much like a dorm building.

So this is where beast bikes go to die.

A cluster of dying bikes at a rack near ISU in Ames. Crazy wheels.

Ben is near a shopping complex with both a HyVee and a Goodwill. One end of the complex featured a totally empty bike rack, but then again it is summer in Ames, maybe it will see more use later. And it was near a health clinic—perhaps the sick don’t pedal to their appointments. To be fair, there were some in-use bikes chained up at HyVee.

Empty shopping mall bike rack. Near an SUV. Sigh.

Goodwill featured many pink girls’ bicycles—seems to be a glut on the market for those.

Bikes for sale at Goodwill. All the small girl pink bikes you can possibly want.

The empty bike rack was a bit discouraging, sort of like an empty park on a beautiful day. Oh, wait. Ben’s apartment is next to a nice city park. With an empty playground on a nice summer day. Parents, turn off the electricity in your house and chase the kids outdoors. Even if the kids are in their 20s. Bike racks and playgrounds are only good if they are used.

Empty city park on a nice summer day. And only person we saw recreating outside was a comply lass in a tiny bikini working on her skin cancer. It's a crazy world.

In Which We Ride Together And I Top 400 Miles

Warm Friday afternoon around 3:30--getting ready for first joint ride of 2014.

Grandchild at the park.

It was just gorgeous Friday afternoon. I got done with a newspaper meeting around 2, and walked by my wife’s office.

She was finishing up a meeting with a student, and she suggested that I ride home and her bike ready, and we could have a ride together. Well, that was a very fine idea, so it’s exactly what I did.

I arrived home first, and had time to get our bikes out and lubricate her chain and pump up her tires. She arrived, we changed into more casual clothes. She had texted one of our daughters and arranged for us to meet at a park that is about 2 miles from our house.

And we were off. She had told our daughter that we would meet them (the daughter and her children) at the park around 4, but as it turned out, we left a bit early and got to the park maybe 5 minutes before the daughter did.

The bike is mightier than the minivan. Or, two old people get ready for a journey more quickly than 4 young children.

After an interlude of play at the park, they hopped back in the van and we hopped on our bikes to meet again at a restaurant in Marion.

The ride there was fine, but our time at ZJ’s wasn’t so fine. It took an hour for four dinners to be prepared, and four children 6 and under to not wait that patiently. Anyway, the irony is that Audrey was chatting with me about whether I had installed lights on her bike (I had), and I though the discussion irrelevant because we were eating around 5:30 with plenty of daylight left. I didn’t count on still being at the restaurant after 7.

Well, we took the Boyson Trail on the way back home, and my bike computer confirmed it was 3 miles to the restaurant and 3 miles home—a 6-mile ride. The meal was unexpectedly long, which meant we got to test the lights on Audrey’s bike on the way home. The lights work just fine.

It was a very pleasant ride. At the end of the summer last year, my wife and I started riding together more often than we have in the past. I hope that trend continues. And sometime during the ride, I broke 400 miles for the year so far.