One of the many reasons we picked Chandler is that it is fairly flat and has many bike paths and lanes compared to other American cities we had visited.
We finally found time to get to a bike shop. We tried out Global Bikes, a local bike shop chain.
After picking out our bikes and the various bits, we realized they didn’t fit in the car. We learned there are two kinds of bike racks for cars. One can go on any car, but is a pain to put on and needs to be removed every time you need trunk/boot access. The other kind means your car needs to have a hitch/tow bar in order to install it.
The advantage of the hitch model is that it doesn’t need to be removed to access the trunk. Our car doesn’t have one (yet) and as we didn’t like the style of the first type, we didn’t want to buy a reasonably expensive item for use only a few times before replacing it with the item we prefer. The bike shop kindly lent us one of theirs even being worth something like 200 dollars so we could get our bikes home. Not only that, the fellow in the shop painstakingly fitted it all for us. I don’t think either of us could have managed this ourselves:
In the end, we did get the bikes back and they are fantastic. They are made by a company called Specialized. They are considered ‘fitness’ bikes by the company (although the people at the shop only talked about them as hybrids, which made more sense to me). Chris has the standard version of the expedition fitness bike, while I have the low entry one. We look forward to getting to know our local area better on bike:
Here’s the video: