Cool bike hunting

Six years ago I made an impulse buy, to give my sentimental favorite beater frankenbike a rest from daily commuting. The new bike was muscular but sleek and sexy, good with a rack and fenders, good stripped down to bare wheels, good in sloppy weather, good on perfect days: it was good.

Cannondale Bad Boy Ultra

But it had a flaw disguised as a feature, a super-proprietary front end that hardly any shop can maintain. This year's cold and snowy weather fully revealed that flaw, and the bike that was meant to carry me wherever I wanted to go whenever I wanted to go there turned into one I dreaded HAVING to ride. Especially on cold days, when a few minutes into every ride the suspension would collapse and the handlebars would drop 3" - more than enough to drastically change the handling. It had to go. I had to get a new bike.

Ride Report: 3/3/2014

Started near Capitol Hill as the next-to-last snow trailed off. My brakes quickly became useless in addition to being pointless as the pads froze and packed with ice, but there was almost no traffic to stop for so I continued. Skidded down the hill on Constitution, then cut first second third tracks in the Pa Ave bike lanes, where I spotted DC's finest parked in the bike lane for the security of Israel or something. Huffed my way up 15th St, then across the Lafayette Park plaza to continue on Pa Ave all the way to Georgetown, spotting just one other rider out on an orange bike - we exchanged "have fun" and "be careful" pleasantries. I skidded out just a little in icy car tracks on M just past Wisconsin and nearly got run over by a taxi-van who seemed impatient to get nowhere.

"Equity", defined.

eq·ui·ty

ˈekwitē/

noun

1. 1.

   the quality of being fair and impartial.

   "equity of treatment"

   synonyms:

   fairness, justness, impartiality, egalitarianism;

Hashtag en-bee-ess-fourteen.

Bikes I have known

Words about my current and former bikes

This is a glossary of the language of bicycles I've had stretching back to the second bike I ever bought on purpose. Before that my parents provided my bikes, usually as a result of lucky purchases from farm, estate, surplus, and police auctions. It's intentionally a bit coy because it's not about the makes and models as much as it is about the experiences they've given me.