Battle of the Bicycles

I hate going fast. So very much.

I'm the first person to stomp on the brakes in the car if it feels like we're taking a corner too quickly (even if I'm in the passenger seat), and I keep my feet firmly outstretched whenever I'm on a toboggan (which, if I ever am on one, is The Last Time I'm Letting You Talk Me Into This) so that I can immediately put a stop to any hint of careening toward a tree.

[Aside: I also hate wearing a bathing suit. And getting water in my nose. Which makes waterslides a trifecta of Pure Evil.]

So it probably comes as no surprise that one of the reasons I love my cruiser bike is because it does not go too fast. It's got great brakes - which see a good deal of use - and its steel frame and rudimentary gear system guarantee a low top speed.

But the main reason why I heart my bike is because it looks slow:

Ain't nothin' speedy about this baby. Look at her - all stylishly sedate. Nice big, comfy seat... a bell (purely for show - it's not like I'm passing anybody)... and a basket to hold important things like MomTeddy and Pokemon cards.

Sigh. I love this bike.

But The Husband does not.

Oh, it was fine when we lived in Winnipeg. As in middle-of-the-Prairies -can-see-the-horizon-for-eleven-miles Winnipeg. This bike's a cruiser and it's perfect for stately and leisurely rides up Wellington and through Assiniboine Park.

But Minneapolis is a little bit hilly. Not Vancouver hilly, by any stretch, but we get our share of slopes here - a lot of up and down-ness.

(Which, if you ask me, is quite silly. Why should I go up and down like a sine wave when I end up at the same altitude as before?)

The oh-so-frequent declines are fine. It's the inclines that have caused some consternation. Not only can I not go fast up them, but I also somehow can't seem to go up them at all. As in, I have to get off my bike and walk it up.

The lack of gears - so much a part of who my bike is - renders family bike rides at best, difficult, and at worst, filled with anger and tears and complaining (mine) and frustration (The Husband's).

So he's been after me for awhile to get a new bike. One with lots of gears so he doesn't have to listen to my whining every time we hit a slope of more than one degree.

In theory, I was okay with this idea (although I did feel a tad Benedict Arnold-y - I've loved my bike for years, and at the first sign of mountainous trouble, I abandon it?). However, in practice, this quickly became a difficult prospect.

The problem lay in the fact that I have a very specific set of criteria for what constitutes a good bike: it must Look Good.

And by "Good," I mean it must look as though someone whose favourite piece of punctuation is a semi-colon owns it. It must have a basket. And a bell. And fenders. And a large-a$$ seat.

Above all, it must look slow.

So, it's been a bit of a battle. Lots of [whiny] "but I liiiiiike my bike"s countered with [frustrated] "but you never ride it and you hate going up hills and I hate hearing you complain all the time." Which is followed by [catty] "well, fine, then, you find me a bike that has gears AND Looks Good."

Shockingly, it is difficult to find a bike that has many gears that also looks slow. Anything fancy enough to have gears looks fancy - like its driver buys clothes at MEC and uses clipless pedals and owns a camelback. Anything that Looks Good is usually a cruiser (awesome!) with only five gears (exactly what I have now, so less awesome).

But after much searching and me rejecting almost everything he found ("look how fast that looks! It looks like a ten-speed or something!"), The Husband actually managed to find one that met the stringent requirements - mostly because he found biking blogs devoted to posting pictures of people looking cool on bikes [aside: seriously?!], and showed me ones with girls who looked suspiciously as though they love semi-colons riding this one:

It's a little diamond-in-the-roughy at this point - I need to swap over my bell and find a better basket than the one they had at the store. It's also missing some old-school headlight action.

But it's got 21 gears, which makes The Husband happy, and it looks Awesome, which makes PM happy. Everybody wins!

(Except the Cruiser. But I'll make sure to save my very slowest rides for it.)