New Bike Day

Believe it or not, but we’ve got another new bike day to celebrate!

Before you start wondering how many new bike days I can get, let me assure you that I will not be having one anytime soon…

Instead, this new bike day is totally Paula’s party 🥳🥳🥳

She traded her Cube for my van Tuyl a few new bike days back, when I got myself a Sensa Giulia G2.

That Cube was bought around the same time as my van Tuyl, so Paula hasn’t had a new bike day in ten years.

Whereas I have had too many to count, the bikes getting more expensive every trade in…

The van Tuyl was not the right fit, but it wasn’t bad enough for her to decide on trading it in.

Besides, she didn’t get out on it very often and for the indoor rides on the Tacx Neo it was good enough.

So I was – pleasantly – surprised when she finally agreed with me that she should really get a new one, if she was going / wanted to go out with me more often.

(Reluctantly, as she thinks that it’s no fun for me to ride circles around her. Which is probably more annoying for her than for me, as I consider rides like that a recovery I should have more often anyway 😂)

We went through the options at the LBS and eventually – unavoidably – ended up with a Trek Domane.

And where I got a Domane SL 5 at the time, she even agreed on a Domane SL 6 AXS.

I managed to convince her that wireless shifting was definitely what she needed.

Like mine, Paula’s bike is fit for duty in rough(er) terrain, like cobblestones or the occasional off road section.

But where mine featured a non-Di Shimano 105 group, Paula’s has the Sram eTap AXS group set.

Given the prices of this type of bikes these days, we had to settle on the Rival group, though.

The same bike with a Force group set, the SL 7, is $4,700 more and there’s no way in hell Paula wants to spend that on her bike.

She had no problem sanctioning me buying one, though…

As this model (no longer) has a power meter, I got her the new Favero Assioma Pro MX-2 pedals.

She can’t get used to Look Keo or Shimano SPD-SL, so she always has had MTB pedals.