My ride to the office is ~35 miles and ~3000ft of climbing along the crest of the East Bay Hills, El Cerrito to Castro Valley and down through Hayward to Union City. I used my 55cm Joe Appaloosa for the ride today, and it was delightful. It was probably my longest ride ever *not* using drop bars. It also was probably the longest ride of the last 35 years on 170mm cranks. I'm a 172.5mm zealot, and I can feel the difference. I'm not going to claim that 170s ruin my knees or anything like that but I definitely can tell they aren't 172.5mm arms (or is it my imagination?).
I'm super pumped about my current front load setup. It's centered on a Nitto Big Front Rack, a Wald Huge front basket, a large Sackville Shop sack, and a pair of rear Sackville Backabike panniers. The rears fit on the Big Front Rack like they were custom made for it. I didn't carry a ton of stuff, but I did carry my change of clothes, laptop and some documents for work. Too bad Riv is out of stock on the backabike bags, because that's a sweet setup. <https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-SG2dCLetPeI/VunBQvRC5vI/AAAAAAAADLI/kq7YhiTTbG08KEBfl21yLf_PmdGTWs9Lg/s1600/IMG_0860.JPG> No extra charge for the wild turkey in the background. Sharp eyes will notice that I've upgraded to a Deore XT rear der. I did that mainly because I've grown to prefer reverse pull, particularly with friction shifting, and I had a reverse pull XT in my stash. Descending on the Appaloosa was a blast. I sometimes did the escape velocity racer tuck with my hands on the hooks of the Choco bars. I blew past a roadie on one of the descents. It was a very timid roadie, but the 'Loosa descends really well. In summary I definitely think this bike is in play for my next tour. I'll load it down more and do a few S24Os with it in the Springtime. Bill Lindsay El Cerrito, CA -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
