Carol Princeton

Dear Carol: Thank you for the reply, and especially for your openness to the idea of bike storage.  First, the dates associated with Hana’s question were only to satisfy the app need for dates as a prerequisite to asking a question — aka — we are not ready to hold any dates on your calendar or ours.  We are offering 40 USD monthly for the storage of two bikes with the idea of selling them or retrieving them from Princeton when the cold weather arrives — please note we have no good place to store bikes at home either, but that’s a more urbanized New Jersey problem of living near the Lincoln Tunnel.  Please don’t consider this an ordinary negotiation where we know the appropriate price we’re willing to pay, because we don’t.  Here is some of my thinking with input from Hana to arrive at our first suggested compensation.  If rentals were available in Princeton we considered that cost of twice per month for a couple of days each visit.  I also consider the potential if the idea attracted others and you had a bike rack with six bikes netting you monetary value that might begin to seem more attractive for you.  Again, I’ve made a suggested payment and even though I suggest it’s not an ordinary negotiation it does mean I do not need to pay less, and I will consider paying more.  As the storage provider you may have different considerations, which I’d be happy to hear.  Even with off-street parking the bikes could get vandalized or stolen.  Hana and I will not insure the bikes, and we’ve considered the trauma of arriving to no bikes or unrideable bikes.  The cost of the vandal-stolen problem lies one hundred percent with us.  As an at least three-property homeowner you have to protect your investments, but bike storage for us adds nothing to the things you need to protect — that’s on the bike owners aka Hana and me.  Without expanding too much I want you to know this off-app bike-storage request is a product of Covid.  Though you’re the first person I wrote with any hope of a reply, this Princeton plan is not our first plan for 2020 recreation.  As Covid shut doors we found ourselves knocking on others.  Again, your European background navigating you to a Princeton retirement living with your artist daughter sounds like a nice life, and your airbnb reviews and ratings also say, “Carol is a nice person”, so even if this deal falls apart I’ll remember you as the kind and thoughtful person who replied.  Sincerely, Tom Doody