Vintage Road Bikes

I've been getting really interested in vintage road bikes lately from the late 70's and early 80's and have tossed around the idea of actually finding a high quality Italian road bike to restore or buying one if I can find a good deal. It is a completely illogical thing to do as my current bike would likely blow any of those bikes away but I think I would greatly enjoy owning one to cruise around in like those car buffs do on Sunday afternoon.

A buddy of mine at work just bought a late 70's Ciocc and I am now extremely jealous. The weekend in San Francisco just added about 4 cords of wood to the fire. It seemed everywhere I looked there was some sweet looking Italian road bike chained to a parking meter. I saw a couple of really neat bikes including a Bennotto a Colnago and a Cinelli. Each of these bikes had really high end components and were very well maintained. The workmanship of the frames and the overall quality of construction was very impressive and they were being used for commuting! The closer I looked around it seemed that there were also a lot of vintage steel bikes that have been converted to fixed gear bikes. In addition to being converted, most of these bikes were painted a flat neutral color like brown or tan or a light green. It is some weird sort of style thing I suppose. The paint jobs on some of the 25 year old bikes were probably pretty bad. There's apparently a whole other cycling subculture in San Francisco that I didn't know existed.

I'm now having fantasies of finding a $20 steal at the La Jolla thrift store or at some imaginary estate sale.