I always rode my cheap bikes in my neighborhood, I had girls bikes until I was 8. Third one was a huffy my grandparents purchased for me new (must have gotten a good deal on it because they never did anything like that) , my mom ended up getting me an old huffy from the 90s to replace that, the chain ended up breaking when I was 14 while pedaling up and hill and the pedal broke during that time as well, I took it back to the campsite we where at all brusied and bleeding and told them I wanted a bike store bike. My dad took me to our local bike shop the following week and bought me the previous years so 2007 giant boulder for 250 bucks. I was happy. I had ridden that thing all over tarnation and it shows. I stopped riding when I got a car and didn't really get back on a bike until I was in college where I used it to ride to campus and back. I didn't meet the grade requirement to continue on through the program ( didn't fail I didn't have my heart into it and got a 2.4 and needed a 2.7 to continue on) and at the time I was devastated. I had made very close friend at that school and had to move 5 hours home. I didn't have a job so I decided to buy and sell bikes on Craigslist after I bought a 1980s schwinn sprint at goodwill for 15 bucks and resold it for 100 I was hooked to buying and selling. I didn't start truly riding until the following summer when I purchased my first modern road bike. I took one ride on it and I knew that bike had been made for me. It was a 1999 schwinn super sport that I spent 44 dollars on. I have ridden it probably about a thousand miles to date. I am constantly buying new bikes and reselling them as it is easy to do and fun for the most part. I kept a list for about 2 years of the bikes I had bought and sold but stopped keeping track. I have owned somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 320 bikes if I had to guess. I currently have probably about 25 and ride 4 or 5 of those. Riding is freeing. It relieves my stress. It makes me reflect on my day. It keeps me sain of mind (quite literally) it has brought me closer to friends and also probably saved me from potential harm. The summer before last I bought my best friend a road bike and we went biking at least 40 miles every week together. It was good times. We would ride out around 10 miles and then turn around. He was always surprised at how tired he was at the end and I myself wasn't winded. We would stop halfway on the way back and just lay on the trail and look at the stars ( keep in mind this was midnight or 1am at times). Those were good times. He asked me to help him find a tandem so that was this past summers project. I found and he built that tandem to a fairly safe condition but he didn't care. He loved that magenta ( he initially hated it but it grew on him) tandem that he named veronica. I got to ride it with him twice but never more than a block as it still needed work. He was killed in September by a drunk driver while he was riding his motorcycle (the woman had a bal of .21 an hour after she hit him). I now own another bike once summer comes. It's a 1966 schwinn twinning named Veronica. Riding that bike as well as my other bikes keeps me in good mind when I have bad days. I ride my bikes every day no matter the weather. I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.