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| Lily at Mission Bay 2010-07-13 |
So on 13th July 2010, she and I set off and cycled to Mission Bay and back - 21K in all. Not bad for an 8½ year old.
We set off about 1520hrs and returned about 1810hrs.
Click here to see the route: Mission Bay bike route (21K) - Gmaps Pedometer
We stopped at Mission Bay for a rest and to take a couple of photos and a quick video.
On the way back, we had a refueling stopoff at Subway, where we shared a foot-long "melt" and a large lime shake from the next-door McDonalds.
Lily was pretty tired. I kept getting her to keep up her speed and stay in a high gear.
It was getting cold as the sun went down, and her hands got very cold. It had got dark by the time we got to Freemans Bay, and she was crying because her hands hurt. We stopped to warm them under my shirt (Argh! Cold little hands!) and then continued home.
A sad follow-on from this tale is that on Sunday 25th July 2010, I discovered that both our bikes
(which had been securely chained together to a pipe rail in the basement of our apartment block) had been stolen.
Lily's bike was a really nice, new intermediate sized youth's bike (Vision Free Spirit model). She cried about it when I told her that it had been stolen.
My superb black Trek SL1000 bike was bought in 2008, and my son had chipped in on it with $200, as a birthday present.
I was furious about the theft - which would have been carried out by residents in the same apartment block, or with their complicity (help). They were stolen from an area which has no security surveillance. My mistake. I had been keeping the bikes in the apartment, for security's sake, but had to make room and so trusted to luck on them being in the basement.
So, as a last hope, I put up a notice on the noticeboard on the ground floor opposite the lift, describing the bikes and asking for info and saying that I would even buy back the bikes "No questions asked".
Much to my delight, someone responded after a week or so - they knew who had taken the bikes, but could only find one bike, so they stole it back and gave it to me. I offered to pay something but all they asked for was if I could pay something towards their mobile phone prepaid card (which they had used to get in touch with me).
On the advice of the police, I kept my eyes open for Lily's bike in the local secondhand dealers' shops, but it didn't turn up. There were no new ones that I could find (that model was out of production) but I eventually found one secondhand on an online auction site (TradeMe) which was almost exactly the same as Lily's model, but a bit older.
She was very pleased at the outcome, and so was I.
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