Careful readers of this humble blog will recall a post almost exactly three years ago – the last time the little red-haird girl’s bike was stolen - telling how we slapped some rust-stain stickers on her new bike to make it look too crappy to steal. I’d ordered them from an artist in England who produces them. And it really did look beat up once we’d put them on, at least at first glance.
And they worked – for three years and 10 days. Saturday morning, sometime between 9am and noon, a wave of bike thefts hit our building. Her bike, complete with all the stickers and scrapes and scratches it had picked up along the way – was ripped off. A downstairs neighbour had it worse: his family had two bikes stolen.
So.
Pissed.
Off!
Not only because at the same time we’d bought her new bike, I’d spent hundreds of euros and countless hours setting up a safe, secure place in our cellar area – behind three locked doors – to store them in.
I’d picked up a special concrete drill bit to install three wall anchors to lock all our bikes to, and we somehow got used to laboriously carrying them down the stairs to the basement every night.
We thought at the time that with all the work and cost involved, maybe we were over-reacting a little, but we saw no other way to store them overnight.
I’d also always thought that locking them up inside overnight was the reason the bike hadn’t been stolen. Not, of course, because of some stickers.
But now it looks as if they’ll get stolen outside our place in broad daylight, too. On a Saturday morning, a time you’d think there’d be enough people milling about to keep the scumbags at bay.
At least it’s some consolation that it’s insured, and that we might be able to pick up some sort of a deal on a new bike. Fall isn’t exactly the time the bike stores are crowded with shoppers.
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
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