I forgot to mention, because of all the hassles with getting the kids dealt with, all the trouble blah, blah, blah ... This all happened the day we left for the woods, not today.
Today, All I Found Was Small Waterfall ... details are yet to come.
My wife was taking things to a local church fundraiser for the "poor" on the day before we left, when she saw an old woman unloading a bike from her van. My wife has known of my need for a bike and inquired about the bike. She just said that her son left this behind about ten years ago and she wanted it out.
My wife came home with a bicycle for me to ride that she has acquired for two dollars.
It had two flat tires, which will have to be replaced, the chain was missing, which will have to be replaced, it had peeling wraps around the handlebars which will have to be replaced, it is dirty as fuck from sitting in a garage for eight years ..... etc. It looks like a piece of shit at first inspection, but she knows how much I LOVE a project.
She gave the asking price of two dollars for an early nineties ('93 or '94 as far as I can narrow it down) YOKOTA English/Hybrid Racing bike, which probably cost over four hundred bucks when it was new. I can lift the damn thing with my left pinky (the one I broke in an earlier life) and do finger flexes. It weighs as xlose to NOTHING as any fancy hi-tech racing bike I have ever seen!!
Now, I did not really want an English style bike (nor anything else english for that matter), but the advanced fourteen speed design with high grade Shimano fixtures all around, still perfectly adjusted after all these years, gel saddle, alloy rims, alloy bar set, super light, chrome-moly construction, quick release everyfuckingthing (it all still works perfectly) ...
I am finding it very difficult to find fault with this discovery, even though I really wanted a more heavily constructed, mountain/offroad bike.
It seems that it was made in Southern California by a Japanese American and the company dissolved after three years into a conglomerate.
