Peace and wheels

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A pair of missionary sisters asked me for bikes. This is a not-unusual but somewhat frustrating request. I would love to give them bikes but I can't. There are bikes in the mission, of course, but I can't send a couple of them to these missionaries because the all the mission bikes are (a) being used already or (b) so far away that transporting them is not feasible or (c) broken. Buying bikes for missionaries is a nice idea but challenging because a decent pair of bikes costs more than £1000.00.


With this in mind I was wandering through Costco and saw they were having a bicycle sale! They had bikes for £180.00! Much to my surprise they were decent trail bikes, very lightweight, good construction and good equipment. So I cheerfully bought a couple of bikes and spent a happy few hours in the mission office garage de-boxing and assembling them. There's something very peaceful and Zen-like about working on a bike, and it's doubly satisfying when it's a new bike.

In the course of assembling them I realized why the bikes were so cheap. They were an obsolete model, were all exactly the same size and had the same colour scheme . This was all OK for us because the obsolete model was newer than any other bike in the mission, the size was right for the missionaries and we were not fussed about the colour one way or another. So we were the right customers for those bikes.

I had one minor adventure putting he bikes together. As I was test-driving the bike in the parking lot there was a sound like a gun-shot and my front wheel collapsed. I have never had a bicycle tube blow cleanly apart before, as this one did (see the photo). My assumption is that it failed on the tube join line. I considered for a brief few minutes returning the bike to Costco, but decided it would be much easier to just replace the tube, which I did.


The next Saturday we loaded up the bikes in the back of our car and drove off to deliver them. I had deliberately left all the wrapping cardboard and plastic on the bikes, partly to protect them while transporting them, and partly so the sisters could have the pleasure of unwrapping brand-new bikes. We arrived and delivered and the sisters were pleased, as you can see from the pictures.


They can now get to church in about one third the time they used to take and are no longer at the mercy of bus schedules to get to their teaching areas. This seems the perfect example of a win-win situation.


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