A good day for bikes


Just a short post today as we have been busy with bikes.

Or rather the Bicycle Mechanic has been restoring two excellent bikes he has retrieved from the side of Spanish rubbish skips, with hardly anything to do to them.

For anyone who doesn’t know, all household rubbish is thrown out daily into a large communal street rubbish bin. There are loads of these, invariably between 10 and 20 yards away from your house.

The theory is that you only throw organic waste in them, and a bit like the UK, you are meant to ring the council if you want something different collected.

Anyway, the Spanish – being good recyclers, or at least some of them are – invariably chuck other rubbish at the side of these bins, and then there is a fight to get the most useful stuff.

Helpful Partner, aka The Bicycle Mechanic, is pretty fast at spotting Useful Stuff, so the front terrace has been littered with various bikes and parts of for the last week.

It’s obviously getting warmer here and therefore round to new bike season, so the better-off Spanish are getting rid of their old bikes.

Here is a pic of him fiddling around with his two new acquisitions, bit of new brake and gear cable or something so he claims, a mere 5€, plus another euro for a couple of wheel nuts.

Why do we need all these bikes you ask? Well on the rare occasion people come to see us, we can go cycling together. Or when we are really down to our last euro we can flog them at the car boot sale.

We brought the tandem with us from the UK. The trouble is since I have become more confident on the bike, we can’t ride together – and the only time we tried to get on it down the street the neighbours nearly passed out in hysterics claiming we were trying to kill ourselves. Hmm. Practice called for there.

Oh, and we actually went for a ride today too. The local carrot run into town for some shopping. Being a pair of total softies we invariably take a couple of carrots for some horses and a donkey that live next to the old railway line. No pix of Greedy One (the black horse who invariably tries to eat carrots AND fingers), but a pic of donkey, who is quite adorable. A darling. I so want to start a donkey sanctuary although it appears I have to be satisfied with a bike sanctuary for the moment.

11 comments on “A good day for bikes”

    • The days of cast-off bikes in Spain are long gone. We’ve seen one of our neighbours take to cycling instead of driving to save on fuel. We’ve still got the odd bike to sort out plus two – horrors! – that we actually bought. He’d never had a new bike in his life, so we bought one for his 50th.

      I adore donkeys, they are so gentle. I’ve always loved them, even back in the days when I rode up and down all day on the beach at Brid. Don’t agree with that nowadays, but I did love doing it. My dad would give the donkey person a fiver and say just let her stay on as long as she wants.

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