Do you remember when you wanted to know exactly how things worked and were precocious enough tear your favourite toys asunder. Looking upon the mess you would create with awe and curiosity which would eventually term to boredom once you established you had no idea how to reassemble it. Rest in peace yellow tonka truck circa my childhood, my bad.
My younger brother was always the opposite of me in such a situation. He would look upon our parents car and instead of wondering how fast it can get us to hockey practice or the beach, he would see an engine filled with all kinds off liquids he could help our dad refill. He`d see brake lines to drain and tires to fill with air. He is a great bike mechanic. I am great at asking him to fix my bike.
Over the summer He and I restored a BMX we managed to grab on the freesies. It was a mess. I`m not talking that the brakes didn`t work, which they did, or that the rim`s were bent, they were fine. It was simply lousy with stickers. The kind of stickers you get from winning energy drink chugging matches in derelict malls. Once again my brother solved every mechanical problem we would face. I sanded and painted, poorly, But, we did have a working BMX by the end. This would be the bike which re-ignited my passion for cycling. By way of it being a hate filled conduit of evil which i likened to riding a bad pun. An upgrade was needed.
Newly armed with my Mothers stolen (abandoned for years in our back yard) Raleigh and all the tools i`d need to fix it, provided i could. I started to really explore Halifax`s parks, and side streets. This lead to the absolute best summer of dating. Ice cream, bike rides and Point pleasant park. I was now a dedicated cyclist putting in twenty or thirty kilometres a day, everyday.
On one of these great summer days i was on a great summer date. I suggested she should come over to my apartment and we could tune up our bikes together and read Sci-fi. Needless to say she was pretty impressed by how confident i was even after i mangled her derailleur. That was a lie, she made fun of me constantly. I suggested we go to bike again (a local free bike repair shop ran by sweet anarchist`s) to learn how to fix our bikes. I never followed through.
As you can see I am the kind of person who should absolutely cycle across multiple provinces.
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