My new bicycle finally came in yesterday. I picked it up today from RiverMarket Cyclery. It is a 2015 Giant Escapade 2, color dark blue. Looks nice, and rides even nicer. Had a nice break-in ride home.
I picked it up today, but they were too busy to finish outfitting it for me. So I’ll be dropping it off Monday before work so they can install the rack, lights and odometer. Would have enjoyed knowing what pace I was actually setting on the way home as I experimented with the various gears.
The Escapade is a 24 gear (3 by 8 shifting), and the shifters are levers you press. Each side has two levers, one to go up, one to go down. Actually the levers shift in and out on the display. So the same lever that shifts the 3 gears up shifts the 8 gears down, and vice versa. Took my hands a little bit of coordination to get used to that.
The gears are so quiet and smooth, and the bicycle itself is so much lighter than the Magna I purchased from Target 2 years ago.
I took it out for a second run this evening while it was still light and when the temperature had dropped down to a comfortable range — which didn’t prevent me from perspiring freely as I always seem to do.
I noticed that when I try to go from 3 to 2 on the front gear, while the back gear was in 8, it always wanted to go to 1 instead of 2. It has to be in the middle of the back gear (3 or 4) to shift successfully into 2. But it doesn’t have the jump sense of my old bike when it does that. I will have to ask about that at the shop on Monday when I am picking it up again after getting the rest of the fittings installed.
All in all I like it, and am looking forward to getting it fully outfitted.
P.S. — I did spring for a bottle holder today — which they were able to put on, and purchased a sport bottle at Target that fits it nicely. It is a Zulu one-touch flip lid glass sports bottle “engineered for athletes.” It has a rubber wrap and is made of annealed glass — both of which are supposed to prevent breakage.