Breaking in our bikes.
With our tax refund, we went out and bought a couple of bikes and a kid trailer. Its part of our attempt to get out of the house and do more outdoorsy type things.
Ciri wanted a mountain bike so she got a Mongoose something or other. Good looking bike, but I think some of the parts are poor quality. Her rear shifter slips. A lot. Still, with some tlc, it should be a good little bike for her.
I’m not a bells and whistles type guy. Give me what I need in a nice neat package. I saw a really cool bike awhile back at Target for almost $300. It was black and it had the comfort seat with a different shape handle bars. I learned that his is a hybrid bike. I didn’t know there was anything other than speed and mountain bikes. The style wasn’t to extravagant, it had a front suspension and those nifty looking U-brakes too. But $300, really?
It’s been a while since I owned a bike. I did some research and found that the bikes you find at Target and Walmart are crap. Here I thought spending $100 to $200 on a bike was expensive. Some websites said that you can own a “good” bike for as little as $400. I said for $400 smacks, this bike better freaking fly.
After reading and researching some more, I began to understand why some bikes cost more than others. The materials used, the quality of the parts, and the design of the frame were all factors on the cost. Who knew? Ultimately, I realized that buying a bike was like anything else. You get what you pay for – sort of. The bikes at big box stores aren’t horrible, their just not great. I can deal with that.
I bought a hybrid bike from Walmart. I’m not a big fan of the frame – too triangular for me. But it’s pretty comfortable. The brakes feel good and the shifting is pretty nice too. The tires aren’t very knobby, but we’re sticking mostly to paved roads or cleared paths. No crazy off-roading - for the most part.
The first time we went out with our new toys was a few weeks ago. I don’t feel like getting too much into it. I’m out of shape. Ok? We’ll just leave it at that. Yesterday, we went on another trip at Lake Johnson and I did much better.
I’m using a GPS app to track and record our trips. The app is pretty cool. It records and calculates a lot of fun metrics like speed, grade, altitude and more. I’m not sure what exactly I’ll do with the metrics, if anything at all, but the important part is the track recorder. I can upload the track files to Google maps along with some meta information. For future bike rides, I can reference my maps and notes to see if the path may be hard or busy or boring or whatever. The added metrics just get my nerd juices flowing – they don’t serve much purpose yet.
The past few trips and the iPhone app I am using got me thinking: it would be really cool if the phone was mounted to my handle bars. I decided that I want to make some sort of bike mount for the phone rather than buy one. Having these statistics on the fly would be cool. In the future, I’ll probably use it as a HUD with a reality augmentation app. 
As for the bikes, we’re still figuring out where the good trails are at. Raleigh has a “Greenway” system that I’ve heard great things about.. I hope to have a good amount of trails to share in the coming months. For now, this is our first one. It’s broken up because I paused it when we stopped.
Godzilla!! Run for your lives!!
