New Wheels!

I took a big step this month. I finally bought a new bike. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but as you know, bikes are expensive.

This time I was lucky enough that the stars all aligned with a good deal and available resource. One of my favorite websites to buy bike stuff from is JensonUSA.com. They also sell complete bikes, but buying a bike without having ridden it is a crap shoot at best. I found this bike on their site and after thinking on it for some time, I decided to roll the dice.

I make it sound like I'm just leaving it up to chance, but that's really not the case. Bike manufacturers publish detailed charts that outline the dimensions of the bikes and it gives you lots of information to base your guess on. The "roll of the dice" part is the fact that these values for bike geometry aren't always reported the same by all manufacturers. It's not always apples to apples, but you make an educated guess. I spent lots of time researching and measuring my bike and I finally decided on a size.

Remember before how I said this was a good deal? That's the only reason I was willing to chance buying the bike online. If I was going to pay retail, I would definitely go into the local bike shop, but in this case, I was being pretty chincy. I got the bike for almost half of retail price because it was a 2010 model. It was brand new, they were just clearing out the inventory.

I've been riding it now for a little over a week. It took a little tweaking (all bikes do) but I'm very satisfied with the result.


The bike is a Rocky Mountain Metropolis YYZ. It's a commuter. One of the reasons I was looking at bikes in the first place (besides the fact that I do it a lot anyway) is I've been looking to either upgrade or replace the bike I ride to work. I was riding my old Trek 930, which is a vintage 1997 (approximately) steel framed mountain bike which I had outfitted with some decent road tires and some worthless fenders. I say worthless because they never really succeeded in keeping my but dry on those rainy commutes.

Another feature of those rainy commutes: water. I know you're surprised. That old mountain bike ran better than it should have for its age, but notwithstanding, the brakes were old. On my way to work I go down some pretty nice hills, so I rely on the brakes a lot. One hill in particular, if I were to have a brake failure I would fly across a road into the ocean. Two excellent ways to negatively impact my health. So this new bike has disc brakes, which were a requirement for any new commuter or mountain bike that I buy.

Anyway, If you've read this far on this post you're either bored, my wife or my mother. Thanks for reading, and know that I'm very much enjoying my commutes.
I guess you could say I rolled a 7.