After my fantastic day out at the adidas Evil Eye half rim launching mountain biking in Cannock Chase I decided this mountain biking lark deserved another look.
So off I went to the bike shed, it's a lean-to actually, to fish out the bike I bought for Mrs Optician Editor to ride after the last bike was nicked from the railway station. She's never ridden it.
This is a weird beast of a bike. It's a Specialised Expedition Elite and has a great big seat on springs. A kind of cycling equivalent to an armchair, if you stood up in an arm chair, its stay out in the cold hadn't gone down too well. The front forks were frozen solid and the seat, handlebars and brakes were covered in snow.
Cycling on the fresh snow was great but the roads were a bit hairy but all in all great fun. The real problem came tring to cycle where a few 4x4s have compacted the snow or where it had formed ridges and re-frozen.
Needless to say the cycle down to my allotment to hack out a couple of leeks and a celeriac from the frozen ground was not as smooth as the Cannock hack on the Orange Five MTB supplied by the hire shop.
I picked up my Specialised bad boy at my local bike shop. I was in there one day having a chat and one of the guys said it had been in for repair but no one had come back to collect it. They sold it to me for the cost of the repair, £150, and it was in pretty good nick.
I looked up the Orange Five out of interest and it was £2,800. I think I'll have to get used to the bumpy ride.
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