Bike Swap Blues

~Note - This is the post that should have gone up Monday, May 21. Sorry for the part where it's two days late, but hopefully time has the same effect on my biking experiences as it does on fine wine. Yeah. We'll go with that. ~


Saturday was a day of reconciliation and disappointment for me. In order to understand that, you must understand a few things. One of them was that Saturday was the date of the much-lauded Hub Bike Swap.

The Hub is a bike shop in Jackson located on my side of town.

 

It has a really different atmosphere from Hoff's in that it feels more like a European road biker place, even though they do a pretty good mountain biking business. I imagine some of that is due to the owner being European, at least based on his German (well, probably German) accent, and riding a road bike. 

I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about The Hub because of a helmet-buying expedition that took me there one day after work. First off, the selection was dominated by helmets that sort of resembled carbon-fiber Tropical Skittles and cost about $150. The least expensive helmet in the whole store was $90. Call me set in my ways and cheap, but I was kind of hoping for a nice neutral color costing $50 or less. When I asked the owner if he had any helmet-like products I hadn't noticed (and I didn't even comment on the fact that those helmets made me think of those 1980s troll dolls) that might cost a little less, he gave me a lecture about how I shouldn't put a price on my safety. 

May I just say, there's condescending and then there's condescending in a German (probably) accent. 

But since the scuttlebutt was the Bike Swap draws a lot of good used bikes and biking equipment on consignment, I figured I'd check it out. Among other things,  I'm liking the idea of getting a bike rack for my car more and more as I learn about places I could take Little Red. Nothing buys forgiveness like the chance to get a new toy at a discount price. I'm pretty sure that's in the Constitution.

I got there about halfway through the swap. As advertised, there were a lot of good bikes for sale. Including this one: 

Seriously, if you look hard enough, you can proclaim a fondness for PBR with all your possessions. This bike amused me enough to check on the price, but $2,000 seemed a little steep, being the equivalent of about two months' rent and utilities. 

If I didn't already have Little Red, I'm pretty sure I would have found myself a bike here, or at an event like this one. It reminded me of going garage sale-ing, except instead of having one or two bikes the family's teens outgrew or the man of the house bought in a fit of crazed weight-loss optimism, there were literally hundreds of every shape, size and type. 

But according to The Hub guys, there was only one car rack in the whole swap, and it was gone by the time I got there. I was pretty bummed out about that, since I was really hoping to find one for less than $70, which is the price of the one I liked at Hoff's. Apparently an affordable car rack is like a flattering one-piece bathing suit - you see them everywhere, except in the stores where you try to find one for yourself.

The good news is, The Hub guys, including the owner, were so nice about giving me suggestions for where I might find what I was looking for that it canceled out the Pissy Helmet Lecture. So I guess the takeaway here is: boo for still not having a good car rack, but hooray for clean slates.