Hahahaha! What a hoot! A tad foolish, but also brave!

Vancouver woman finds stolen bike on Craigslist, steals it back

VANCOUVER -- What do you do if you see your stolen bike advertised on Craigslist?

If you’re Kayla Smith, you steal it right back.

Smith’s new, $1,000 bike was stolen from a rack outside a friend’s apartment in Vancouver’s Olympic Village sometime before midnight last Wednesday. She filed a police report.

When a friend saw Smith’s distinctive bike in a Craigslist ad at 11:30 a.m. the next morning, Smith didn’t stop to think. Within 45 minutes, she was posing as a buyer, meeting the seller in a McDonald’s parking lot just blocks from where the bike was stolen.

Smith, who works as a bartender/manager in Gastown’s Portside Pub, didn’t even stop to call the police. She isn’t usually a vigilante, she said, but “I didn’t want to wait and I didn’t want to spook him.”

“I’m not going to say my heart wasn’t pounding,” said Smith, 33. Once she was sure the bike was hers, she just hopped on and kept on pedalling.

“I thought this is it, you’re not going to get it back,” she said.

The seller had scabs on his legs, scabs on his arms, was unclean looking and wore dark glasses, Smith said. He was five foot nine and had a pockmarked face and blond hair.

Smith, five foot two, who describes herself as “125 pounds and tough as nails,” was just too mad to worry about the man beating her up.

“I just figured once I got away, I was going to be OK,” she said. “I hid around the corner with my girlfriend Jen. He took off running.”

Vancouver Police Const. Brian Montague said about 1,700 bicycles were reported stolen in the city of Vancouver in 2012. So far this year, 794 bicycles have been reported stolen.

“We recover a lot of bicycles every year,” he said, but police often can’t return bikes to their owners because many people neither record the bike’s serial number nor engrave the frame with an identifying mark such as a driver’s license number. “With a serial number, it can be recovered anywhere in Canada,” he said.

Montague said Vancouver Police would have preferred working with Smith to recover her stolen bicycle.

“We’re glad that she got her bike back and we’re very glad that she was not hurt in the process,” he said.

Smith has not yet replaced her solid chain lock. “Being a modern day Robin Hood takes a lot out of you,” she said.

But she figures she’s learned her lesson.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to be locking that bike again,” she said. “If it’s not coming inside, I’m not going out.”

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Vancouver+w ... z2dE5c2cNa

We've ALL made "seemed like a good idea at the time" decisions ~ thankfully, this one worked out safely and well ~

Sooz