My apologies in advance, this entry will probably be photo-less. Next time I'm at my parents' house, I'll have to go through the old albums and see what I can scan. If I can dig up some pictures, I'll edit this entry.
So who am I, and how did I get into biking, you ask? Well, I got my first bike for my 6th birthday (a red 16" Schwinn that my parents still have in their basement) if you don't count the tricycle I had for a year or two before that, and I've been pretty much hooked ever since. That's the short version.
About a year or so after that, I outgrew that Schwinn between 1st and 2nd grade and it was replaced with a red and yellow 20" Schwinn with a banana seat, much to my chagrin. I can get pretty set in my ways (and I think I was worse at 7 than at 34), and I did not want that bike. I thought it was ugly, and I can remember not wanting to give up the little bike. But I wasn't given a choice in the matter and before long my little sister was riding my red bike, so I was forced to ride the new one through most of elementary school. Finally, around 5th or 6th grade I had grown enough to ditch the banana seat and get my first 10 speed, a blue Raleigh. As a kid, I was never into the BMX scene or anything like that, so a dirt bike never crossed my mind. All I wanted was an adult bike like my parents had, something with gears and a hand brake rather than coaster brakes. Then, during 7th grade, I outgrew that bike and traded it in for a new red Raleigh 12 speed.
The house I was born in was on kind of a busy street, so I wasn't allowed to go very far those first couple years I had my wheels. I think I was limited to going next door in one direction (that was at the corner of an even busier street) and about 4 houses in the other direction. The lady who lived in that house always had Kool-Aid and goodies from cereal boxes for my sister and I, so I loved going down there to hang out. I also remember she had a giant collection of Dr. Seuss books. Her kids were about 15 years older than me.
However, at this house, my sister's room was only slightly larger than my walk-in closet (I'm not exaggerating by much), so right before my 8th birthday, we moved to a new house in a quieter subdivision. When this happened, the territory I was allowed to explore exploded. Within a year and a half, I could go anywhere I wanted in the subdivision, and I made the most of it with my wheels. Also tantalizing close were a couple gas stations and a drug store that had lots of candy and soda (at least to my elementary/junior high age brain). The road between the subdivision and those stores was narrow (at the time) and heavily traveled though, so I had to get special permission to go up there, and it was a treat when I did.
On the way home from one of these trips, I had my worst accident to date on a bike. It was the summer between 7th and 8th grade. I had gone up to the drugstore with my sister and one of her friends, and the last thing I remember was turning onto my street coming home. The next thing I remember is waking up several hours later in my bed with an ice pack on my head and 2 cracked front teeth. From what I'm told, there was a parked car across the street from my house, and somehow I ran smack into the bumper of it, tacoed my front wheel, and I guess I went over the handlebars and cracked my teeth on the bumper of the car. It was something from the 70's with a chrome bumper, not the plastic ones we have now. I probably would've bounced right off the thing if this happened today! I was hurt, but apparently not too bad. My mom says I walked inside kind of whimpering and went in the bathroom to look at my teeth. This is when the accident was discovered and they rushed me to the dentist's office to see what could be done. I guess my dentist told them that my mouth had to heal first, because he didn't do anything that day. I was just told not to eat anything hard for some length of time. I was suffering from amnesia at that moment because to this day, I do not remember this visit at all, a fact that would aggravate my parents to no end when I wasn't following the dentist's orders. For all I know, they made that trip up. A cap, a crown, and a root canal later, I have my front teeth back, and fortunately they aren't the false teeth that can come out if you try to eat something like an apple or Milk Duds. Thankfully, my biggest residual issues so far are a slightly off color tooth (I don't know if it's the capped one or the crowned one, but it seems to have absorbed less color than the rest of my teeth from my years of drinking too much soda) and the occasional bleeding when a toothbrush bristle hits my gums the wrong way when I brush.
Like I said, I tacoed my front wheel in that accident, and the frame was damaged as well. Raleigh stood behind their lifetime warranty on the frame, and a new frame was shipped to the shop I got the bike from. The new model was out, so my red framed turned into a black one (that I actually liked better), and my parents just had to pay to switch the components over to the new bike. A couple years later though, I turned 16, got my drivers license, and the bike started to sit in the garage.
End of Part 1. To be continued.
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