Pith Helmet

A bit pricey at £95, but this Danish helmet is one of the most dapper I've seen. Available from Bobbin Cycles

New Bike Show Episodes

Doh, I've somehow managed to miss a whole 8 new episodes of The Bike Show from Resonance FM, but not to worry as they're all available online at The Bike Show. There's no finer way to start a Friday than tweaking some Perl scripts while listening to Jack's adventures on a bike around Flanders.

Watching The Giro

If like me, you want to watch this year's Giro, but you don't get the Eurosport channel, you can watch it online using their online Eurosport Player for £3.99 a month (so I'll be cancelling come the beginning of June :-))

Not much to watch today though, the riders have decided it's too dangerous and are just poottling round at a slow speed (until the very end)

Getting A New Bike

Inspired by having the Ride2Work scheme at my present job, I've decided to invest in a new bike. Having ridden both my hybrid and flashy-road bike over the last few years, it's focussed my mind on what exactly I want a bike to do, namely:

• be usable for the daily commute
• be able to do light touring (maybe a week in Scotland, rather than a month round Africa)
• *maybe* be comfortable/practical doing something like a 100-200k

To me, these requirements make perfect sense, but it does seem as if they fall between a number of stools. Road bikes are built for speed and generally spurn the need for mudguard-clearance or anywhere to attach panniers. Tourers do well on those points, but are generally built for serious touring, with an associated weight and lack of whizzing-in-and-out-of-the-traffic-ability. Hybrids too, are slower, and generally don't have drop-handlebars, leaving your wrists craving new riding positions once you do much more than 50k.

The remaining options (at least in Evans - who we can only use for Ride2Work) are:

1. cyclocross bikes
2. audax bikes.
   

Cyclocross bikes look like mummy racer had a one-night stand with daddy mountain bike, with a road frame but knobbly tyres (which I'd swap for road tyres) and enough room to stick guards and panniers. Of these I ordered the Specialized Tri-cross, Genesis Croix De Fer and Kona Jake to try. The Specialized looked great and had carbon forks, but just felt sluggish to me. No doubt some of it was due to it's chunky tyres and it's more relaxed geometry, but it just didn't seem right.

The Genesis felt much better, with disc breaks and a steel frame, but Evans have run out of them now, which conveniently solves that dilemma. I'm still waiting of the Jake as Evans only seem to have one in my size, which is trapped in some limbo between London and their Gatwick warehouse never to materialise into a test-rideable form.

An Audax bike, is a bike designed for riding Audax events :-) These are essentially long-distance, non-races of any where between 100 and 600k, the more hardcore of which feature people cycling for days on end with a few hours kip grabbed here and there. The best bikes for this kind of lunacy are fast touring bikes i.e. perfect for what I want. Unfortunately, the one such bike Evans stock has a slight Granny vibe about it, but otherwise had the best feel of all the bikes I've tested so far and again was steel so should be comfortable on those longer rides.

So which will I go for? Evans have just phoned to say that the Kona *should* be in London tomorrow, so hopefully I'll be able to final make my choice (if only so I don't have to put up with anymore of their indifferent customer-service)
[TO BE CONTINUED]