Last month, I bought a new bike.
This
might not sound like a life-altering purchase, right up there along
with buying a house or even a new car, but I've actually been in the
market for a new bike since before I even started shopping for a new
house (that was in early 2015), and in many ways, it has been an even
tougher decision! I wanted to make sure that when I bought a bike,
everything about it would be perfect. Which meant, of course, that I
simply never bought a bike at all.
What
finally spurred me to move from bike shopping to bike buying? Plain
old-fashioned desperation. My old bike, Greenie, had been around the
block a few (hundred) times, and he was really starting to show his age.
At some point a few years ago, I tried to replace the front shifter
cable, failed at that, and finally removed the front derailer entirely.
Ever since then, my chain has been prone to falling off when I go over
bumps. Pretty much everything else on the bike was equally out of tune.
My problem downshifting into fifth gear
hadn't improved in the 4 years since I first noticed it; the brake pads
were on their last legs; and, the last straw in a cavalcade of minor
annoyances, the pedal makes a scraping noise whenever it turns. It had
progressed beyond my ability to fix it (make it worse) myself, but it
didn't seem worthwhile to take it into a shop to be goaded into some
temporary semblance of repair.
It
was time for an upgrade! For real this time! A little before Christmas,
I took the plunge and ordered myself a bike on Amazon. My boyfriend's
Christmas present to me was professional assembly by our local bike
shop. A few days after Christmas, we picked it up at the shop to
discover...it was the wrong size! I had ordered a small and somehow
ended up with a fully assembled (at the cost of almost as much as the
bike itself) extra large!
With
disappointment, a bit of shame (why had I not checked the box to verify
I'd received the right size!?), and a certain amount of trepidation
(would they accept my extremely costly-to-ship return in the
not-original packaging?), I sent the bike back (they refunded me) and
spent a few months wallowing in uncertainty. By this time, the fantastic
deal I'd received on the first bike was unavailable, and I was
beginning to have my doubts about whether I'd have liked that bike even
if it had been the correct size.
Returning
to the drawing board, I revised my expectations a little. I knew it
wasn't very likely that I would find the bike of my dreams on the first
try, especially since I was switching to a completely different breed of
cycle—a road-leaning hybrid style after a lifetime of riding a mountain
bike! So on my second round of serious bike shopping, my top priority
was price. I would make some compromises, get a bike that would under no
circumstances cost more than 400 dollars, I would find out what I liked
and disliked about it, and then the next time I was in the market for a
bike, I would know better what to look for.
Since
I hadn't been so keen on the first bike I'd ordered online, I decided
to give a local bike shop a chance to sway me. I tried a couple of
mid-range hybrid bikes, at a significantly higher price than the ones
I'd been looking at online. Both of them rode so much more smoothly than
Old Greenie, I was almost convinced I could love them...except they
were black. I hate to say that the single strongest factor deterring me
from the purchase of these otherwise good bikes was their uninspiring
color. But I I hop on my bike at least 12 times a week and spend 3+
hours weekly riding it. If I couldn't feel even the tiniest spark of
enthusiasm when I look at it, I just couldn't commit to buying it!
A
few days later, I finally found the perfect "starter bike" on the
Performance Bicycles website. It wasn't black. It wasn't a beautiful
shade of aqua like my second-choice model either, but it was also
cheaper by almost a hundred dollars, so I decided that white was a good,
affordable compromise. I was sold when I learned that it would come
with free assembly and lifetime adjustments by Performance!
So finally I found myself in possession of my new bike! As I always do when I receive a new shiny thing, I waited a few weeks to give it a name, to see what really suited it. The name that kept coming back to me was Snowflake.
No,
it may not be the most creative name out there, but I think it embodies
the spirit of freedom and ease that I'm trying to achieve with my
newer, faster, lighter wheels. My old bike (Greenie) had been named
after its color, so it seemed it appropriate to keep the tradition
alive. I'll probably never ride this bike in the snow, so its name adds
just a touch of subtle irony as well.
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