Post-College Biking

After college I didn't have a bike for almost a year. When my mom had moved out of the house I grew up in we had gotten rid of our older bikes since there was nowhere to store them in her new condo. I ended up buying a bike in February just before moving out in April. It was a solid Trek mountain bike that cost me close to 400. That bike helped me get back into more serious riding instead of the just biking to get places I had done in college. It lasted me a year and a half until I managed to more-or-less total it. 

I was biking to work at the time down an access road along a major road in front of a shopping center.  Everyone was stopped at an intersection waiting for traffic to slow on the main road so that they could turn on to it.  I had slowed down but didn't stop at the stop sign and didn't see a car that was hiding behind an SUV that was waiting.   The car pulled into the intersection and right in front of me, and I T-boned the car.  I had almost managed to stop myself in time but not quite, so I didn't hit him all that hard.  Because I was going slow I had managed to turn myself and brace somewhat for the impact.  I bounced backwards off my bike, and landed on my padded backpack full of clothes, and my helmet kept my head from taking a hit. 

The guys car had some seriouis dents/scrapes along both side doors.  I walked away pretty much unscathed, but my front wheel was slightly bent and the handle bars were twisted.  While I still have the bike and can still ride it, it looks off and doesn't ride all that well, so I don't fully trust it.  All things considered I was pretty lucky.  The driver was freaked out, and even though in court it likely would have come down to my fault for running the stop sign, he was happy to not exchange info and get out of there.  Since I was fine I figured that worked.

The following spring I bought another bike, this time a road bike.  Unlike my current bike, this was definitely not a mountain bike - it had a thin road tire, no shocks, and all in all was a little less rugged, but not so much so that I couldn't take it on grass or other hard-but-not-paved surfaces.  I was really liking that bike and going on some substantially longer rides in the 3 months or so I had it before it got stolen.  I took it with me when I went to Alabama the first time for a month, and it ended up getting stolen out of my car in a 2-hour window outside my hotel in front of the busy pool on a Sunday afternoon.  I was pretty bitter about that, and really all of alabama.  That was a bad month that led to several more bad months that led me to leave that job.  But since I was travelling and working so much I didn't really miss not having a bike until I bought the new one this year.