It has been many years since I pretty much gave up on bicycles. My last engine-less two wheeler was a Diamondback mountain bike that had 21 gear combinations and probably weighed less than a tricycle. It was a lovely machine yet I rode it very little. I think I always tried to tell myself it was awesome and that all bikes should have been made like this a long time ago but the reality was it sat unused most of the time. I just didn't like the posture I had to be in to ride it. Being all hunched over with much of my weight on my hands and having to bend my neck upward to see what was coming in front of me. All the hi-tech light weight materials and components of course made for efficient riding and better handling but somehow it all left me behind in the process.
When I lived in Banff there was nothing but expensive mountain bikes and anyone daring to ride anything else would likely have been banished at least to Canmore, if not all the way to Calgary (the horror). One day while walking I saw a friend of mine riding some kind of strange machine. He was sitting perfectly upright and was able to see all around without bending his neck at all. He wasn't carrying any of his body weight on his wrists. There were no brake levers on his easily reached handlebars, no multitude of cables and wires protruding from here and going to there and no big prickly mass of gears in the rear wheel. He wasn't going really fast nor did he seem to be trying that hard. He wasn't wearing any spandex, had no corporate logos on his shirt and wasn't even wearing a piece of painted styrofoam on his head. (I mean I know it's PC to at least look like you're protecting your head but making bicycle helmets out of stuff that would actually make a significant difference in the event of a real crash would mean you'd probably end up with something resembling a motorcycle helmet and I think we all know that's not gonna happen.) Anyway, I was intrigued and would later learn that what he was riding, what I thought of as just a plain old normal bicycle, is now called a cruiser.
It seems I am not alone in my nostalgia for a simpler bicycle. Apparently cruisers are all the rage these days and are indeed running the risk of becoming truly trendy. Although maybe slightly different from a modern cruiser and more closely resembling a traditional European style bike here is a photo of my very first two wheeler just to prove that I had one before they were cool.
(I'm pretty sure the training wheels came off later that very day!)
Recently I found what I now feel is pretty much the pefect bike on the internet. Here it is.
Note the higher than the seat and swept back handlebars, the comfortable cushioned seat, the absense of brake levers, cables and mutiple gears, the nerdy but functional fenders allowing you to ride in wet without ruining your clothes. It's just a bike, peddle to go, peddle backward a bit to stop.
I heard that Pat's had cruisers for rent in Waterton so I decided to try one today. At $6/hour they are the cheapest to rent of any of their bikes so that was a little bonus. I was hoping to find something like the Trek Cruiser Classic pictured above but what they had were these.
When I saw it I was instantly a bit disappointed. It obviously had too many gears (7), cables going all over the place, brake levers for BOTH hands and not even any fenders. How was I supposed to look like a trendy hipster™ riding this thing. Even with the swept back handlebars people would shirley still assume I had Mountain Dew in my water bottle. I had to remember this whole test wasn't about rejecting an old fad by riding a new one but about finding a comfortable ride.
The upright posture was instantly a huge change from any bicycling I have done since I rode sitting on a Banana seat in the 70s. Definitely a welcome return to old school riding in that regard. However, I made my first gear change about 90 seconds into the ride. It's funny how much more you recognize slight hills up or down when you ride a bike. Very quickly the ugly and impure gear and brake cables were forgiven their mere presense and became invisible. Working hard to climb hills made me glad for the little weight saved by the absense of fenders and coming down a short but steep unpaved trail made me glad to have brakes both front and back. In the end, I decided that what I was riding was really the best compromise of modern technology and comfortable riding for anyplace that isn't perfectly flat.
One extra note for all of you with mountain bikes. Unless much of your riding involves you wearing a number bib at events with the word extreme in the title I think many of you would benefit from changing to a smooth tire like the ones I rode on today.
The lack of perpetual minor vibration caused by excessively knobby tires is immediately noticed and of course very welcome. So the next time you need new tires...
At the end of the day I decided maybe the one speed, one brake, cableless bike maybe isn't the best option afterall. The comfortable upright seating position and the easily reachable handlbars are what's most important to me. Other than that, extra gears and good brakes are probably still a good idea even if they ruin the whole retro look and vibe. Maybe next time I'll rent one of those hybrid bikes that looks like a mountain bike but has much higher handlebars for comfort.
