After over a year of planning and research (I clearly need to go back and add the Edgerunner to that comparison chart!), and many months of waiting, we have our new bike!
We picked her up from the bike shop last night (shout out to the guys and gals at The Hub, especially Greg, who helped us price, order, and build our bike — there are a number of local bike shop (LBS) options in St. Louis, but we’re partial to these guys, for their knowledgeable staff and great customer service!).
My first thought upon seeing the bike was that none of the online images accurately captured the frame color. Based on what I’d seen, I expected a bright light blue. My best description of the real-life color? Aquamarine.*
My second thought was, “Those are some big-a** tires (and fenders)!”
We’d driven our car, complete with trunk bike rack, to The Hub, and we briefly considered trying to wrangle the thing onto the rack. I decided that we’d waste so much time in the [perhaps impossible] attempt, that it’d be better to cut our losses and ride it home.
But first, food! After Matthew and I each took the bike for a quick spin, sans passenger, to make sure there weren’t any glaring issues for the bicycle mechanics to address, we loaded Sir in his new ride for the three block trip to Dewey’s Pizza.
Post pizza, I geared up for the four mile ride home, while Matthew helped Gabriel into the car. We already had Matthew’s bike on the rack, since I had picked him up from work to go to the bike shop, and he commented, “If not for this darn car, we could all bike home together.” Indeed!
I was quite happy with how the bike handled on the way home. The 11-gear internal hub seemed to have plenty of range, and for a big bike, she’s pretty zippy. Matthew only beat me home by seven minutes!
While I was the first one to get to ride the bike any distance, Matthew had the honor of the first “real” trip with Sir on board.
This is Sir’s second week at preschool, and he went in style this morning! He’s very excited about our “new blue bike.” There was a slight delay in departure, as we fussed with the seat and bag combination (more on that in a later post, but using the Yepp seat with full-sized longtail cargo bags is a bit tricky), but soon enough they were ready to roll!
We still need to add light mounts, and we’re planning to swap the old-school pedals with clips for SPD pedals that have a regular platform on one side. I’ll write another post with full specs/build details for any of you gear-heads (specs/build post here).
All-in-all, I think we made a good purchase and are going to be very happy with this bike (and wishing we had one for each of us!). While I’ll miss having Sir in front of me, I know we’ll have a lot of great adventures on our new ride (name still TBD).
Her Green Life 