A Bike for the World

Getting your driver's license is one of those events that every teenager dreams about. And for most teenagers it means that an old friend gets pushed away.  My daughter's bike hasn't been used in two summers. It was not the greatest bike in the world to begin with. She's thinking about going away to college, far away. There was no chance that the bike would go with her.

We could have sold the bike for maybe $50 but instead I decided to donate it to Bikes for the World. As their website explains, Bikes for the World takes bikes and other useful items and ships them to the less fortunate in far flung places.  So today, I drove Lily's bike to Burgundy Farm school and handed it over.  I also gave them three old tubes that no longer fit any of the bikes I still have.

Donate Bikes Here

These were donated within the 1st hour

After my good deed for the day, I returned home to wrassle with some new panniers.  I bought some Ortlieb panniers to replace my worn out ones. Ortlieb slightly modified the design so I had not much fun getting them to work on all three of my bikes without interfering with my feet. I was more or less successful. Some tweaking will almost surely be needed.

Now that I have new panniers and have two old, slightly leaky panniers that I can use to transport messy stuff. Big Nellie and I used one to fetch a bag of birdseed from the local hardware store. For the first time on my bike, I wore a ratty old sweater that I had squirreled away in my office.  It's not as soft as the holey sweater but it did just fine.

Once that task was done, I was hungry. Big Nellie and I headed for Old Town Alexandria to find some grub. For some reason I felt like eating fish and chips again so we ended up at Eamonn's for the second weekend in a row.

I headed back home and put Big Nellie away.

The shed is now an empty nest.