Bicycle lust, magpie-style
Even after riding it for about 20 years now, I’m still happy with my Trek 1000; when I bought it, the people at the (now demised) OutSpoken bike shop helped me select the right size, so I can get on the thing and ride it until I get too tired to continue without mangling my arms, my legs, or my butt (I’m someone who has resisted wearing the standard bicyclist pull-up-diaper style pants, so being able to put 40-50 miles on this bicycle and still be able to stand is a good thing,) so I haven’t been paying much attention to the whole custom-built bicycle market despite Portland having so many custom builders that you couldn’t fit all of them into a two-car interurban train, but would have to add a second section to get them back to the warehouse where all of their stolen bicycles were found.
Possibly it’s because none of them paint their bicycles pink.
Or, at least most of them don’t paint their bicycles pink. Sweetpea Bicycles, which appears to be the custom bicycle maker of choice for quite a few of the bicycling weblogs I read, builds bicycles pretty much exclusively for women, and had the exquisite good taste to paint one of their prototypes pink.
It looks like a really nice bike, with about the same frame geometry that my Trek 1000 has, but with better laid out cableways and a wider rear triangle. I’m lusting pretty severely after this bike. But if it wasn’t pink, I wouldn’t have taken the second look, and gotten to the “but it’s soooo pretty” stage.
This is perhaps a good reason to start thinking about looking for another job.