What a quest!
Written by Mike Young on August 16, 2009 at 9:23 pm
My 6 year old son is at that age where he has outgrown his 12″ bike. It’s so bad he cannot even turn the pedals. So I figured I’d take him to get the next size up, which is a 16 incher. Well, apparently it’s only okay to need a 16″ bike if you’re a girl. They had every flavor of 12″ bike or 20″ bike, but nothing in his size, except if he wanted something with Barbie or Cinderella on it.
We went all over the place. We went to Walmart, Target, Performance Bike and so on. We drove to Loveland, Longmont and Fort Collins. I easily put on 200 miles trying to find something for him. The irony in the whole thing is we actually had found a bike for him at the Super Target in Longmont, but we hadn’t decided to get him it at that time. We kinda wanted to look around first.
Now, I should mention that I had ruled out anything that tried to resemble a dirt bike. I can’t stand those ones that have all the fenders, fake tail pipe, etc. And I don’t want my son riding a bike with Disney characters. That was okay a couple of years ago. But not now.
Anyway, we found a couple of alternatives as we drove around. Performance Bike had a really nice one, but it was 3 times the price of the Target one we saw in Longmont. So then we went to Walmart and found a no frills one. But it looked pretty cheap and flimsy. The bottom line is that nothing quite stood up to the one we first saw at that Target in Longmont. Obviously, we could just go to the next closest Super Target. Right? Well, that would have been too easy. We tried a Target, a Super Target and couldn’t find the bike. Just those princess ones.
Finally, it’s after 8pm on a Sunday and we’re heading back to Longmont to get the bike that we first saw and liked the best. Our boy isn’t napping like usual. Nope. He’s up and anxious to get there. But guess what happened as we pulled into the parking lot? We saw our son’s bike be ridden away by some other little boy. But that wasn’t the best part. We only worked at this 2 days straight. It had become an adventure. But imagine our surprise when our son burst out with, “those bastards!”. Were we shocked? Or did he just sum up exactly what we were thinking? We just told him not to say that at school.
Comments (4)
Category: Misc. Rants, The Young Clan
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Made Sunday, 16 of August , 2009 at 11:00 pm
Let me just say for the record….. while I am guilty of many words that are totally and completely inappropriate as a mom, bastard is not part of MY vocabulary. Just sayin….
I still think that pink and purple bike was cool. *LOL*
Made Monday, 17 of August , 2009 at 7:16 am
I was getting pretty close to buying him that girl’s bike. At least we know that the next size will be easy.
Made Monday, 17 of August , 2009 at 8:35 am
LLOL @ H! My autistic 8-yr-old has learned (from the movie Transformers) that while running from something scary one says “Sh!t, sh!t, sh!t!” He now employs this while playing with other kids on the playground. Doh! He also recently upgraded his bicycle and LOVES the red and black 20″ one his grandparents got at a Target in Michigan. I’ve got a black and green 16″ that we’re not using, but getting it from SC to CO could be an issue . . .
Can you order the bike from the Target website? Of course then you’d probably have to assemble it.
Made Tuesday, 18 of August , 2009 at 5:30 am
That’s funny. I can just imagine hearing that and seeing the look on the faces of concerned parents 
I looked at the website and they had a lot of “themed” bikes. We did manage to get the bike. But the adventure was worth documenting.
