I can has bike!

[eregyrn]

Today I drove in to Allston to look at a bike from Craigslist. (Two other attempts to buy from Craigslist resulted in a bike way too big for me, and one way too small.) This one was just about "just right" -- with a little seat and handlebar adjustment, that is. This is a Ross Peryton hybrid model, probably made between 1994-96. (The woman selling it had bought it used herself, so she wasn't sure.) She and her boyfriend had done a tune-up on it, so it rides pretty well. (She said it had been riding badly, so she bought a new bike, and then they were tuning it up to sell it, and she realized, "Hey, if we had done this in the first place, I wouldn't have had to buy a new one!"). $75.



(Picture of the cute little white winged stag logo.)

So I paid up, and we stuffed the thing into the back of the Mini, anchored it around the front passenger seat, and bungeed the hatch shut. Then I drove up to Lexington Center, to take it out for a spin on the Minuteman Bikeway.

It was a 3.5, maybe 3.75 mile ride out to the Bedford end of the bikeway, and the same back, so I did that. (The combined there and back would be about the distance it would take me to bike into work. Not on that bikeway. Along a different bikeway.) It was a good, low-traffic straightaway, so I could get used to the ride and how to shift gears on a bike, and what the various gears did, and using the hand-brakes and all. It was a nice ride. My legs felt a little fatigued on the way back, I think because it turned out that from Bedford to Lexington was just a little bit uphill. But otherwise, I wasn't bothered by the ride.

(Yes, I already had a helmet. I bought one last week when I went out to see the first bike I looked at, in case that one worked out. I got a Bell Faction in matte black.)

I also found that I was totally able to unload and load the bike into the back of the Mini by myself. Maybe I'll look into a bike rack for it, though. We'll see.

So, yay!

Comments

[maxineofarc.livejournal.com]

I tried biking to work for a while when I lived in Medford, but riding on Mass Ave was a sufficiently awful experience that I stopped doing it. All the biking lit I've read emphasizes finding alternate routes that have less traffic.

And yet, there were always idiots biking up and down Mass Ave with no helmets and their iPods on, and they didn't get killed...

There are some nice bike routes down by the river in Alexandria. I'm pretty sure you could bike into Mount Vernon if you wanted to, as well as into the city.

[eregyrn.livejournal.com]

Mass Ave.: yeah, forget that. (I'm already plotting how to ride down to get ON the Charles River path, on the least-busy roads around here.)