It's rather funny. I recall one framebuilder laughingly referring to the bulk of the Classic Rendezvous gang as the stingiest cheapest people he had ever dealt with. I thought this was simply a silly and completely joking statement - considering some of the pretty costly rarities some collectors had accumulated in their vast stables. Now I begin to understand the truth of this.

As a self proclaimed old fart (or at least a steadily ageing one), I am often stalled in a mindset of what prices once were and what I would like them to still be today. And, at the same time I regularly see many 20-30 year old cyclists casually dropping 5 or 6 thousand bucks for what strikes me as simply a rather boring modern bike which will be of little worth in only a few years. And, I'm also often stunned with the seemingly bottomless wallets of some Japanese collectors. I am still wide-eyed at seeing a 45 year old Peugeot racing bike slowly inch it's way up through dozens of incremental bids on ebay to what, realistically, is only the cost of a rather decent yet mundane modern TREK or Cannondale.

I don't have the disposable income to really indulge all of my lustful bike desires or even to bid a couple grand for a vintage bike on eBay. So, I content myself scrambling for bargain finds. ~ I suspect that in the REAL world "BananaBrain's" prices are really not that outrageous after all.