This was another bike, like the Marin mountain bike, that I got because I was bored at work and never thought I'd actually win the auction. I think I paid $100 or $150 shipped. It came from a bike rental service, and seemed to have been used only lightly.
In 2007 I took a bike tour in Provence with a couple of friends. I was in bad health at the time, but it was not a very strenuous tour. It was loosely organized by a bicycle touring company, meaning that they booked a bunch of hotels and B&Bs for us, dropped off some bikes and maps at the first one, and hired cabs (obvs the distance between hotels was not great!) to carry our bags from one hotel to the next.
The bikes were Trek hybrids. They were great.
Hybrids don't get a lot of love. They are thought of as lowest-common-denominator bikes for fat people. Well, I am here to tell you that hybrids are fucking cool.
What's wrong with a comfortable, upright riding position? What's wrong with lots of gears and good brakes? 38mm tires? Perfect size! You can put fenders and racks on them!
This whole "29er" movement is a clever mask for the return of the hybrid. "Rigid 29er" is marketing speak for "cool hybrid".
I'm telling you! Hold on to your vintage hybrids. They will be worth bucks by 2014.
So back to the Raleigh Passage. It retailed for about $400, I think, and at that price was a really good deal. It was not very light, weighing maybe 35 pounds, but it was otherwise flawless, for what it was. The suspension seatpost and front shocks worked very well. The low-end Shimano trigger shifters worked almost flawlessly. The disk brakes were really good. I'd never had a bike with disk brakes before, and they were overkill on this bike, but they worked very well.
This was a bike engineered for the novice rider, and engineered very well. The novice rider ploughs through rough sections, and on this bike you could do that - it just would glide through potholes.
I started fearing that I'd become a bad rider on this thing, because I would no longer have to get up off the saddle or think about anything. I felt that my weight was always in the right place. I felt incredibly comfortable on this bike.
Too comfortable.
I would start hating my 45-pound Phillips 3-speed with the torn and broken saddle and dead spot between the 2nd and 3rd gear.
The only real problem, other than that, was that it looked wack as hell. It was like a brand new pair of sneakers in an inner city junior high school. These sneakers.
It was like sweatpants.
If I ever give up on looking at all cool, and just want to get from point-A to point-B, I will get another Raleigh passage 5.0.
(By the way, I had more pictures of this bike, but I haven't located them yet.)
