A good bicycle makes all the difference!

I first became a fan of using bicycles as transportation when I moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand. That city has a lot of people in it and traffic can be really nasty if you are in a car or on a motorbike. So on a whim I decided one day to purchase a bicycle and see how that would help me with navigation of the city. It kind of changed how I feel about transport.

This was not a good bicycle. I had never heard of the company. It was all sorts of heavy and the deraileur and brakes were probably minimum quality. None of that really mattered though because it was so much better than the bicycle I had before that, which was none at all.

I found myself cycling to almost anything that I would do and I would just bring a backpack with a change of shirt because I would normally arrive really sweaty. Since I don't really dress very nicely anyway none of this really mattered.

One thing I also discovered was that I started to seriously enjoy feeling like a kid again as I would jump curbs, get up to high speeds, and sometimes just tool around in a parking lot doing little jumps here and there. I'm on the back end of my 40's so I enjoy feeling young whenever I can make that happen.

Later, when I moved to Vietnam, I ended up just giving this bike away to a friend and that was a good home for it. When I arrived in Vietnam I purchased a similar bike for around here.

That was the day that I found out that Twitter is the name of a bicycle company as well. This also was not a good bike but it was sufficient. The only times that I really found out the limitations of this bike was when I was climbing Monkey Mountain with it and honestly, that is too much work for someone in the sort of shape I am in anyway, so I didn't need a better bike than this.

Unfortunately my trusty Twitter bike ended up being stolen from outside my condo one night and I don't even blame the thief, it was my stupid-ass fault for not locking it. When I saw the state of the thief on the CCTV footage I decided to not even pursue them with the police - not that they were going to do anything anyway. This person was desperately poor and I wish I could find that guy and just give him some money or try to help him out in life.

Whatever! Twitter is long gone.

I would later end up purchasing my first ever street bike and it was a fixed gear bike with ultra skinny tires. This thing was mama speed on a frame but I never really got to see what a bike of that sort can actually do because it only had one gear and the tires were so skinny that even the smallest bump in the road would be a frightening experience. You can go ahead and forget about ever taking that thing off road.

So when the time came to think about getting a different bike, a newer bike, I was kind of happy to discover that there is a shop here in town that is owned by a foreigner that has been a cycling enthusiast for many years (decades probably, i dunno, i just met the guy) and he speaks my language fluently.

it isn't that I don't trust Vietnamese people, it is just that it is really difficult to get exactly what you are looking for when there is a language barrier involved. In the end I probably could have gotten my new bike for 10% cheaper from a Vietnamese shop, but I wouldn't have had the ease of communication or the assurance that things will be taken care of if something goes wrong. To me, that is worth the extra 10%.

I took one of the rentals out for free after making a purchase decision and man oh man, what a bike this Marin Fairfax is.

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As you can probably tell by the timestamp in the bottom right corner, this is not my bike or even my picture. My bike hasn't arrived yet and I am still on the rental. however, the other day I took it out for an "explore ride" where I don't really know where I am going and am just heading in a particular direction and looking to see what is around there. This ended up taking me down some gravel roads and even jumping some curbs in order to get to my temporary destination a bit quicker. I want to avoid being in traffic as much as possible and that is easier said than done in busy Da Nang, Vietnam.

What a joy it was to be able to go to this territory because my road bike wouldn't have been able to do the gravel or the curbs, and my Twitter had too wide of tires to get up to speed on the roads. Therefore this Marin bike is exactly what I am looking for.

While this isn't exactly picturesque, it is quiet because the roads don't yet connect to anything major. Quiet is difficult to find in this busy city, and I love it.

As far as bikes go, this is not a super-bike. it is not super high quality, but it is also not crap like the Twitter or the one I had previous to that one. It is an entry-level top-tier bike kind of like a Giant or Trek. It is not heavy, it is not carbon-fiber light either. It's just kind of in the middle. It was around $600 for purchase and honestly, that's kind of what I think you have to pay for a bike of this magnitude.

So if you follow my stuff get ready, because I am about to start going exploring all over the place in Da Nang to places that I think most people never make it to. Construction sites and half-finished roads no longer frighten me and because it has some awesome hybrid tires on it, I can also get up to high speeds on tarmac as well.

The exercise I am going to be getting from this that is also not going to further damage my spine is just an added bonus.