I’ve been sparing the Roadini the indignity of salt and slush, but the roads were briefly clear yesterday, so I leapt at the chance to take it out for a spin before it snows again:
I am very, very, very happy with this bike:
Unlike this guy with his gravel bike:
I don’t know if he shouldn’t have bought a gravel bike, but I do know he shouldn’t have bought that particular gravel bike, because my goodness is it ugly:
Sorry, that thing is objectively the opposite of gorgeous. The buckled top tube makes it look like a steel bike that’s been in a head-on collision, and the wheels look like those weird seed pods that trigger people’s trypophobia. I mean it’s no Faggin, but it’s ugly.
So what should he have gotten instead? Why, an “all-road” bike, of course!
I’m sorry, WHAT?!? You couldn’t get an all-road bike…in 2022? And I thought Specialized were audacious for claiming they invented the all-road bike in 2004:
It was crazy enough that people thought the gravel bike was a new concept; now they think the versatile road bike is also a new concept. I’m not even sure there was ever a time you couldn’t easily buy a versatile road bike. But I guess you can never underestimate the power of marketing:
And what, pray tell, is this revolutionary new all-road bike he should have gotten? Well, apparently it’s a Cervélo Caledonia-5:
It’s like no other road bike you’ve ever seen, apart from being exactly like every other road bike you’ve ever seen:
It also has in-frame storage, and it takes fenders, and it’s laterally stiff yet vertically compliant:
Great job, Cervélo, it’s almost as versatile as a 20 year-old Jamis:
Yes, bicycle marketing can really make you feel like you’re beating your head against the wall, which is why my spirit animal is the woodpecker:
But at least he gets to eat a bug at the end:
I truly am the cycling world’s preeminent avian photographer.
Speaking of feeling like I’m banging my head against the wall, every time I look at the Desert Hipster Website I find something else that makes me want to go Full Woodpecker on the nearest hard surface, and now I see that when they visit a place they put the name of the tribe that used to live there at the end of the post:
Now, I don’t know if they always do this, since it’s rare that I make it to the end of a post. However, in this case it’s a post about a guy in Connecticut with a lot of cool bike parts in his garage. So unless the story’s about how he’s going to give the land under the garage back to the aforementioned tribes, or about how the garage was built on one of their ancient burial grounds and the ancestral spirits are trying to kill him with his collection of vintage derailleurs and chainrings, the inclusion strikes me as gratuitous.
You won’t find anything like that on this blog, that’s for sure.
