Introducing..... the Ute

I hope that our faithful readers have managed to survive the wait for this post. Here's the story.

Last Saturday after visiting Canyon Road, the fiesta, and Guadalajara Grill, we were rattling our brains for our next activity. A good default idea is to visit a bike shop. So off we went to Santa Fe Mountain Sports. They had a bunch of junk in the parking lot on sale, but amidst this stuff was a Kona Ute in the 18" size. I looked at it, Jill looked at it. I thought it would be fun to ride it so as to compare it to Moscaline's Surly Big Dummy.

Nice young shop worker says test ride is no problem and raises the saddle for me. The tires were almost flat and the saddle was still a little low, but I enjoyed very much. Shop guy pumped up the tires and lowered the saddle for Jill to ride. She enjoyed. After her ride, the shop guy says he can take 25% off the price. SOLD!

You may recall that we rode our bikes to SF, so getting it home is a challenge. Now if I were superdude, I could have loaded my bike on the Ute or vice versa. Instead, after riding home on Sunday, we drove back to the shop picked up the bike, and ate chile rellenos at Maria's. That was a better plan.

I've only ridden it a couple times in the neighborhood, a couple times with Jill sitting on the back. She's done some real errands with it. vSo far, we love it. It's surprisingly light, I guess because the frame is made of aluminum. The stock tires are FAT, 700C x 45mm. Nice and cushy! It's sized so that both of us can ride it despite our 9" height difference.

I would change a couple things about it. First, the max height of the saddle is about an inch or two shy of my preferred height because the frame is small. Also the seat tube angle is a fairly steep 74 degrees. And I don't like the disc brake in front.

There's still a few things to work out. We're looking around for a seat to strap to the rack, probably a stadium seat thing. Also we need to fabricate some footpegs for the rear passenger. But for now it's doing great carrying groceries and dropping stuff off at Goodwill.

The plan is that this bike will enable us to avoid using the car for grocery shopping and big errand running. We also hope to use it for transporting a young person, but much depends on what happens with our foster parenting plan.

Apologies for no action photos -- the days are getting shorter so fast.


Jill made a super yummy cake this week. It's tough for the two of us to eat the whole thing, so we invited our next door neighbor to eat a piece with us. Previously, we had only very brief conversations, so it was really nice to have a long talk. The next night, we took it over to the Polkadots and nearly finished it off.