Evan Dodds – Non-work-related blog

Last weekend was just a crazy weekend in terms of hobby spending. We went down to the Labor Day “SkiBonkers” sale at SouthCenter and bought our ski passes for Summit (to get early-season rates, since we were planning to buy them anyways). But then we also bought skis and poles. So now we have all of the stuff we need for our season of skiing.

Except, wait… no we didn’t! We had no way to get our skis from point A to point B at Summit, or Crystal, or Whistler or wherever. Getting them home from the SkiBonkers sale was no problem since we could just throw them in the back of Jodi’s car and put the rear seat down. That won’t work with MIL and Tim in town for our BC trip in January, or with Scott and Arika going to Summit.

So, it was off to REI to (finally) buy a ski rack for the Mazda. No problems, they were having a Labor Day sale on Thule rack equipment. 20% off. Yay! So we got the factory rack adapter and a 6x ski rack package. At which point we realized that we should probably get the Thule bike carrier stuff while it was also on sale. No sense paying 20% more, right?

In a flash, our trip to REI had become pretty darned expensive. So why not push it over the top? I also bought a new bike.

This part demands a little bit more explanation. I already had my old Mongoose mountain bike (from 1996 timeframe), so why buy a new bike? Well, I wanted a lighter “road-style” bike and I’d been looking and test riding various ones for a few months. I hadn’t been able to come to a decision on what to buy. Problem was that although I hated the heavy weight on my mountain bike and I wanted something with drop-bars, I was not all that thrilled with the jarring/bumpy experience of riding a carbon bike with 110psi tires on a standard, cracked road.

I’d been struggling with that for a few months and was about to give up when I noticed a bike at REI that looked like a road bike, but had slightly higher clearances and slightly larger (and lower pressure) tires. A Cyclocross bike! Sweet! I remembered someone mentioning to me a while back that Cyclocross bikes make great commuter bikes since they handle well in sloppy weather and can take fenders easily, but they’re still rather like road bikes in terms of basic layout. I was sold. This bike had it all!

In the end, the process took hours and hours to complete. Partially because REI was so busy for their labor day sale, and partially because they were INTOLERABLY SLOW. I won’t recommend the bike buying experience at REI to anyone, but bear in mind I’m drawing this conclusion from a limited sample set (me).

But, at the end of it, I had a shiny new Cannondale Cyclocross bike (roughly the same as this 2007 model, although mine was an end-of-season 2006). And now I have no excuses not to ride regularly, Jodi tells me.