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i bought this magnificent bike on facebook marketplace for $55.55. I’d been wanting one for a while, shooting forgettable ‘is this available’’s to every few bike postings I’d see.
This bike spoke to me because she has a story. She’d been sitting in the storage unit of the woman selling it for 10 years.
here’s the catch: the woman selling it never actually used the bike. the actual owner of the bike was a friend of the seller, who’d bought the bike with the intention of sobriety , hoping the bike would ease off her smoking problem. she’d only just started using the bike when she got transferred to work in Hawaii, leaving the bike behind.
so, the years went by. while people freeze-danced to Black Beetles by Rae Sremmurd, underwent a global pandemic, badly lipsynced to Despacito, elected an orange president not once but twice, and entered a brat-loving recession…
the bike kept waiting.
for me!!!
🥹
she’s rusty and has flat tires, but her gears are in great shape! nothing can stop us from joyriding the west coast this summer. She’s so worth the after-work/employment search hours I spend on my slice of a balcony :) I’m going to show her (and myself) that good things are worth the wait 💖
Patience, persistence & WD40 is all it takes :)
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One time I went on a bike ride from Boston to Newport, RI, and it was honestly one of the best times of my life. I remember setting out and being nervous about whether or not I'd be able to make it the whole way. I was pretty new to biking in general and had never created my own route before, so I ended up riding along a lot of highways and paths that definitely weren't made for my bike.
I wrote a new journal entry each time I went through a new town and stopped to take a picture of everything that I thought was pretty, which was nice because you can't always stop to do that in a car, and I feel like it made me take closer note of everything that was going on around me and everything going through my mind. No detour had to "make sense." I was just biking.
I met so many different people who I still think about every so often. My two battery packs and my phone died multiple times, so I had to pivot and find somewhere to stop. I met a woman at the CVS who let me use their picture station because they have all the cords you need and her daughter ended up being one of my classmates. She told me to make sure to call my mom and let her know where I was, and we had a really nice conversation.
It kind of felt like I was in the Truman Show because I don't think I ran into a single person who wasn't nice to me, and we always had something to talk about because everyone wanted to know why I was biking 80 miles. It was mostly because I was bored, but I also wanted to visit a friend. It was pretty spontaneous, and I was underprepared, but I have so many good memories from that trip.
My friend's girlfriend was working on getting her sailing license, and she took us on a sunset cruise that was hosting a bachelorette party and a golf club and we all drank so much champagne and just talked. We went to his local bar and talked to every single person in there. I met a guy who would only let us play darts if we threw them while his hand was on the board, and he ended up getting us drinks the whole night.
Before then, I had never been around that many people who were just genuinely interested in getting to know each other. I had always fallen into just having a specific group of people that I'd open up to and be myself around (which is fine and valid), but it wasn't really until then that it kind of clicked that I was kind of hiding "myself" or all the versions of "myself" that I could be and closing myself off from meeting people who I could get along with or share things in common with, and I carried that feeling the entire way back and met even more people. I stopped at more restaurant's and food trucks to eat alone, and I felt comfortable; it wasn't lonely, and I wasn't afraid to ask someone to take a picture of me or to ask where they were from and just talk.
This post started as something completely different in my head, but I said all of this to say that biking definitely changed my life for the better. I want to bike further, and I want to bike with my friends, and I want to see more things on my bike. Some of my favorite memories from the past 5 years happened while biking. My mom thought it was crazy to spend $450 on a bike, but if you take good care of it, it can last for years and I'm gonna use the same bike to plan a trip cross-country with an Amtrak rail pass this summer.
If you've been considering it, I HIGHLY suggest buying a bike.
Mar 30, 2024
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Idk why I only got hip to this method of transport as my primary one this summer as this is my 4th year living in New York. I was notoriously 30 min late everyday to any class before 12pm in college or any class I didn’t care about purely because my method was train or bus then train and I’m one of those people that always just thinks they have 20 minutes to spare when it takes so long for them to put a perfect outfit together and they then negate breakfast every morning. I was often late to morning shifts of retail jobs for similar reasons or the bus just was late late late… Or I’d oversleep so much going to class didn’t even seem worth it.
But now. I realize. If I had just taken a fucking bike. I really wouldn’t have been the latest girl in the world all these years. And I love biking; it’s literally how I survived lockdown. my daily routine was get high all day and ride my bike around my suburban hometown to different locations and keep smoking (until this led to an actual psychosis.)
perhaps I was intimidated by nyc chaos. I will admit electric Citi bike is not for the faint of heart. I’ve almost gotten hit numerous times. And once somewhere around Times Square on my way to the JT concert, a strange man with a high quality camera took a picture up my skirt? Hopefully it was blurry as I was going the speed of light but idk. so many of the docks are broken which may cause insurmountable frustration? And there was one time this summer I went to 5 different stations and every dock all of them were dead and it felt like the electricity system was conspiring against my ability to meet my friends at Mott Street Eatery.
Regardless. I’ve felt safer transporting myself at night without the fee of an Uber. I’m more often at time. I feel like I’m flying. Ive gotten to reconnect with my passion of the bike ride. I love to whip around with my friends who equally love biking. And I feel unstoppable.
My dad wants me and my sister to invest in collapsable helmets but that feels embarrassing like borderline voyeuristic - and I’d have to really commit to the bit as I bike probably average 4x a day now. he says young people avoid safety precautions because we have huge ego. Considering the amount of accidents these fast ass bikes cause: he has a point.
Live love laugh electric Citi bike. It’s an art you should master. I have a need for speed.
Oct 7, 2024
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While winter doesn’t normally strip me of my ability to ride my bike, my winter commuter is currently out of commission with a stuck seatpost, so I’ve had to winterize one of my other commuters to serve this purpose - since it’s a nice day out, I just spent the morning giving this a good tune up. It’s a very zen process for me, and I love the fine tuning and little modifications to get everything running all together!
It’s not perfect, I built this whole thing out of stuff from my co-ops parts bin last year, but it’ll get me where I need to go!
Feb 23, 2025

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