Stupid. Just stupid.
I came home yesterday from running a few errands, but knowing that I’d be headed back out to visit with friends in an hour or two, I left my bike locked to the bike racks under the Cambie Bridge. Instead of going back out, however, I went to bed early with a book and ended up passing out just shy of midnight, completely forgetting my bike on the shore.
Well, that was dumb. This morning when I rowed over, my rear wheel and my handlebars were gone. I still have the frame, and the seat, and the cranks and the front wheel and all that, but the bike is far from rideable.
What’s worse is that this was my ‘winter bike’; the faithful steed that has carried me around Vancouver and area to the tune of approximately 10,000km over the past three years. The rear wheel was a Shimano Nexus-8 internally-geared hub, laced with black spokes to a nearly-new Alex rim, wearing grey Michelin Speedium-2 rubber – if you spot anyone selling this wheel on the street, please let me know!
Replacing the wheel with a new equivalent will probably run me $600, which basically means I’m back to my track bike for the next while. The only bright side is that the Nexus-8 has been refined a lot in the past three years, and the newer model is significantly better engineered and much lighter. I’ll probably take the opportunity to build the wheel myself; I’ve never done that and I’ve been kind of looking for an excuse.