Bikes

The diary for 1988 suddenly ends, as diaries sometimes do, it was summer and the weather in Southern Ontario was amazing, even though we were both working we were finding plenty of things to do, after six months we still felt like tourists, as though this was an extended vacation.

Money had become a back burner issue and wasn't such a traditional worry as it had been, and even though we had a seventh floor apartment, a pair of bicycles appeared one day, two reasons for that, first we thought that they would make us fitter and second, they were incredibly cheap.

In the days of my brother Rob and the Prescot Road Club, back in the 1970s, an aluminum cotterless chainset cost a small fortune, and here, in Canada a ten speed racing bike, lightweight with full Shimano chainsets and gears cost a scant ninety-eight dollars. This was back when the exchange rate was around 2.40 dollars to the pound, so the bikes cost about forty quid a piece.

Even though, as time would show, they were never really used, besides a few trips down to Lake Ontario and back, they were very shiny and they were ours.