Bikes of WalMart

Sometimes, my legs get restless ... even when the rest of me is not yet rested. As with most problems in life, there are basically three main ways to react to this kind of thing:

• Whine about it
• Fix it
• Turn it into a positive

Sunday morning, I went with option number three. If my legs don't want to sleep, why should the rest of me?

When the weather is nice and this happens, I go out for an early morning bike ride. It was still very cold Sunday, however, so I instead got dressed and started doing some of the things that I should have done on Saturday, instead of riding the 200K in Murfreesboro. One of those things meant a trip to WalMart.

Now, I hate going to WalMart like some people hate going to the dentist (disclosure: my father was a dentist, and he hated being hated, so I do not allow myself to hate going to the dentist). But, if you have to go to WalMart, I recommend a 24-hour Super WalMart at 6 am on Sunday. The kind of crowd that you have to work your way around at WalMart late at night has passed out from their Saturday night bacchanalia,  and the kind of crowd that mills in the WalMart aisles early is still getting ready for church.

On the way into the store Sunday, I saw this out front:

It kind of flummoxed me. Was this the mode of transportation taken to work that evening by one of the night staff? If so, where are the lights? Why didn't he/she lock it to the nearby light pole? Was it an attempt to return an unwanted present? The bike looked fairly new, but I think even WalMart wants you to bring the merchandise back inside the store.

Assuming that somebody had ridden it to the store, even if the rider couldn't afford lights or a lock, do you really just want to try the minimalist security approach of removing the front wheel? That rarely works, even if you go the extra mile of pulling the quick-release.

Anywhere other than the Cool Springs WalMart just after dawn on a Sunday morning, I like to think that this bike would be stolen. But maybe I'm delusional, thinking that anybody would want a bike enough to go to the effort of actually throwing it into their trunk and driving away.

Or maybe I'm just assuming a level of athleticism that you don't usually find at WalMart.