In Honor of Ugly Rental Bikes 04/15/09

I owe a lot to an atrociously ugly (even, dare I say, fugly) beach cruiser. In the spring of 2007, I went on vacation in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. The whole place is basically a huge retirement community with some of the coolest older folks. They were up with the sunrise to play bridge by the pool and stayed up for the sunset to play dominoes by the pool – sign me up! Anyway, in this bucolic place a natural activity, after tennis and shuffleboard, was to rent a couple of beach cruisers and explore the nice bike path down the beach to the park.

might want to raise the seat a bit...

The bikes were god awful ugly, but I don’t think I was fully aware of the severity of their aesthetic failures at the time. Besides having been beaten by the proverbial ugly stick, they were also not so comfortable. BUT. They were fun in the sun. And they planted a seed, so that after that vacation we casually talked about buying bikes of our own one day to cruise around on.

like my bike? No?

That was almost exactly a year before we actually bought our bikes. And somehow, instead of simply cruising around on them, we ended up living on them. So, thank you old folks and ugly rental bikes. You served me well.

(Yes, this was a phase when I was dying my hair dark red.  Why not?  It’s behind me now.)