New steed, no motor

A recent visit to my mother-in-law's totally resurrected my interest in bicycling. She's a hardcore cyclist with a few bikes on hand, so she was able to outfit us for a 16-mile round-tripper. Fun stuff!

The whole experience brought a back-burner curiosity to the front of my conscious: fixed gear bicycles. So to the internet I went to learn what I could.

Most of my newfound knowledge came from Sheldon Brown's site. There's a lot of good information there, but it led me to realize that finding an existing fixed-gear bike or converting one myself was probably not going to be cheap.

So I continued to insert-coin at Google, and came across a fixed-gear offering from Walmart. I determined that this was the cheapest means to an end, and sold out.



For about $3, Walmart happily shipped the bike to our doorstep in a box. It assembled rather quickly and as soon as possible, I gave it a whirl. I've never ridden a bike that felt so solid, though I'm not exactly a frequent cyclist. There are less tolerances to be tested with a fixed-gear setup it seems, so everything felt firm and aligned and I had an absolute blast scooting around on it.



I'll have to brush-up on the fringe skills that seem to come in handy while riding a fixed-gear bike. But I look forward to the challenge, and can't wait to take it for a spin again!