One of the things people often say about Canadians is that they’re kind and polite. That’s true as a rule, but in some cases it’s also true in exceptional circumstances.

We came back from a two-week vacation to find that our bikes had been stolen from our garage. Not good. This was a fairly sophisticated theft, though — the garage was locked, so they must have used a remote control opener (a feature soon to be disabled!) to either target that garage or just drive around alleys and see if any door would open.

So far, not particularly interesting. A bit weirder is that they rummaged for what must have been quite a long time in the garage, dumping some of the freezer contents on the floor (they didn’t even take the polish vodka!), making a mess of things (even if it wasn’t that clean to begin with), clearly looking for something easy to fence. Luckily, most of my power tools are on Gambier, so as far as I can tell no tools are gone. But the bikes are gone.

All of that isn’t weird. What’s weird is that they used allen keys and screwdrivers to carefully take off things that they didn’t want off the bikes: rack and saddle bags, a nice bell, even the LED lights! Unfortunately they didn’t leave behind the brackets for the front basket on Emily’s bike and the hard-to-find bracket for the trail-a-bike on mine.

So, maybe kind and polite is a bit of an overstatement, but still, not your everyday smash-and-grab crowd… They even left some fleecy gloves. Maybe we can get some fingerprints from the inside…