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04 June 2003: "Trail cred"

A couple of months ago, a friend of Carolyn's donated a bunch of stuff to us which had been gathering dust in her garage for years, and which we might put to better use. This included a lawnmower, some lawn furniture, an exercise bike and a bicycle. The latter was particularly handy from my perspective, since I don't have a driver's license and it would give me a means of transport to get around town.

Well, the bike had languished in Karen's (Carolyn's friend) garage for a decade if not more, and because the inner tubes were rotten it spent a few months in our garage until, finally, last Saturday, we took it to the local bike shop to get it tuned up (the wheels needed straightening) and have the tubes replaced. The guys at the shop took one look at it and were mildly in awe. It's a Schwinn World Tourist (men's, brown, 10-speed), which means nothing to me, but I'm assured that it was more or less the top-of-the-line model of touring bicycle when it came out. Which in the instance of this particular bicycle was over two decades ago, apparently. I took some stick for allowing so much dust to stay on such a classic bike.

Well, I picked it up this afternoon (and also bought some lights to mount on it), and Carolyn and I decided to explore the Chehalis-Western Trail southwards from 14th Avenue. The frame's a bit small for me, but it runs very smoothly indeed. The fun part was when we were crossing either Fir Tree or 89th and some—evidently knowledgeable—cyclists coming from the opposite direction started going "Wow, would you look at that!"

It's brilliant; this machine went straight from being SotA (State of the Art) to vintage classic, without suffering through the stage of being "so last decade." It confers instant trail cred to its rider. (I feel like a bit of a poser, though, not having even heard of Schwinn before last year; I'm used to Gazelle and Batavus myself.) And as I say, the World Tourist is a joy to ride. Thanks again, Karen.

PS. I originally wrote "Grand Tourist" instead of "World Tourist"; I do apologise.

Update: after some research into the serial numbers, it would seem this particular bicycle was built on 12-Jul-1983. Not quite two decades, but close enough. It's one of the Taiwanese ones, by the way.

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