Holiday report #1 – Seize the day!
Las Vegas is widely acknowledged to be a place that’s sore on the legs, as the main strip is pretty long, so there’s a lot of walking about. I wasn’t even staying on the strip, but I like walking, so I was quite happy to walk down to the strip from my hotel. Until the day I passed the pawn shop and saw a nice bike for sale for $80. It was red and shiny. The next day, it was still there, so I called in to find out more. The bike would cost $80 to buy, and the pawn shop would take it back for half of that, which would mean I could have my very own bike for $40, for as long as I wanted it. The pawn shop even had a lock and a few helmets for sale.
But I’ve never bought anything from a pawn shop in Las Vegas before (not unexpectedly), and didn’t know how much a conventional bike rental would cost. So I wanted to check it out a bit. It turns out that bike rental is fairly expensive in Las Vegas, so it looked like a good deal after all. And I decided that the shop was probably honest enough.
So the very next day I decided to go buy a bike. And it was gone. It had been sold earlier that morning. I was unimpressed. The other two bikes that they had for sale were both more expensive, but they were unridable – better bikes, but with really, really badly worn tires. I checked out another pawn shop, but they only had even more expensive bikes.
So I had a cycling-free holiday. The moral of the story – seize the day! If I hadn’t hesitated, I’d probably have had a great cycling adventure in a faraway land. But instead, I took a day to think about it, and didn’t.
But having said that, if I had got the bike, I probably would have pootled around a fairly small area, especially since it was pretty warm to cycle in. And I suppose there is a reasonable chance that I would have ended up as a human hood ornament on a big American car. Instead, I hired a big American car myself, and I was able to travel to the mountains on either side of the city, and really enjoyed it.
So the other moral of the story is that things usually work out okay, even if it’s not what you planned.