I left my heart on Craigflower Street (but I kept my wallet)

Vancouver Island, home of the world's most beautiful bike. Which I didn't buy, despite extreme provocation (Ibis Mojo SL, fully kitted-out with XTR components, in Trans Blue. CAD$7500 + tax* when we entered the store, CAD$5000 by the time we left).

Even writing about it now makes me really want to go back and buy the thing, but $CAD5000 + tax@5% = CAD$5250, which = NZ$7000, which is NZ$2000 more than we'd budgeted for my bike purchase. And if I'm not spending $CAD5000 on that bike, I'm sure as heck not spending CAD$4600 on the non-SL version with XT kit on it! So, I'm off tomorrow to buy a boring, comparatively cheap, more widely serviceable, Specialized Stumpjumper.

If we were staying in North Vancouver much longer I'd be buying an Enduro, if not something even bigger, because on Friday we picked up a demo bike for me (Ibis Mojo, non-SL, XT kit) and headed into the woods, onto the trails recommended by the guy in the shop**. Five and a half hours later we emerged from the forest, ragged, tired, and chilly. We'd ridden up the mountain on the access road, which was a nice wake-up call for legs too-long deprived of pedalling. Then we rode*** down a series of trails, starting with a black diamond run, because we're very stupid. Back up the access road, past where we turned the first time, and off the other side of the road, onto the Executioner trail. Which starts out flat then turns uphill, which is surprising, although it's sure to be a temporary thing. Or not. Small patches of snow started to appear, then progressively larger drifts. Soon we were riding/walking the bikes though shin-deep snow, climbing over deadfalls, and crossing meltwater gullies deeper than I am tall, with icy streams at the bottom. Sense eventually prevailed - although not before both of us had snow in our shoes and were smelling deliciously cedar-like form the trees we'd been scrambling over - and we headed back down the trail to the access road, where we found the start of the Executioner trail awaiting us, pretty much exactly where the map said it would be. A little bit of trail***, a little bit of road, and we were home for showers and food.




* = 5% on bikes and some other things, 7% on some other things, 12% on some other other things. Tax is never included in the listed price, which means regular till-side scrambles for more money, because the amount you've readied (like a good, polite NZ purchaser) is not enough to cover the extra

** = I'm still not sure whether shop-guy seriously thought those trails were good ones for us to hit, or whether he was taking the piss in an especially malicious fashion. Either way, I'm buying a bike elsewhere - especially after seeing him try to sell a $50 pump to a bloke buying a bike for his 5-year-old. The guy even said "Don't you just have a simple, standard, not fancy-pants**** pump for, like, 8 bucks?" - and places like Mountain Equipment Company (Kathmandu equivalent) DO have those, I've seen them. Hell, even places like Canadian Tyre (Warehouse equivalent) have bike pumps appropriate for a small person's bike tyre. It's not like they're going out into the Moab Desert on a two-day epic, where life and death hinge on being able to pump up a tyre in a sandstorm before the 40 degree heat makes them dead - they'll be noodling about the neighborhood, or the local forest pathways. Shop-guy should have told them. Shop-guy didn't. But then I guess shop-guy probably didn't want them to see how much less they could have spent on the bike itself, or on the helmet, or the sumo-wrestler horn.

*** = may have included more walking than riding

**** = may not have used the words "fancy-pants"