New Bicycle

Today we picked up a new bicycle for Miranda from Bow Cycle. It’s a Specialized Vita, in “gloss purple and white”.

She has been growing pretty quickly this year, and she was really too big for her Kona Makena that we bought for her three years ago. Ian was still doing okay with the red Norco, but he was having trouble keeping up with everybody on their bigger bikes. So the Kona is now his:

He’s still a little leery of the bigger bike. He really is not a confident rider. He likes riding and going places on his bike, but he really doesn’t take any chances especially when starting off. Miranda by comparison is Evel Knievel.

So the Specialized Vita is a hybrid bike, but it’s closer to the “road bike” end of the spectrum instead of the “mountain bike” end. We also looked at and test rode the Specialized Ariel, which was more towards the mountain bike end. But Miranda liked the lighter Vita. It has narrower, road-style tires on it. It’s something like my Giant Seek, but the Giant is much more ruggedly built for hopping curbs, etc.

It’s a “small” Vita, but she still has a lot of room to grow into it. Depending on whether or not she keeps growing, she may or may not need a bigger bike someday. This bike easily fits Tammy. 🙂 In fact, there is a lot of similarity between Miranda’s new bike and the Specialized Dolce that we bought Tammy last year. I expect that Miranda will start pushing Tammy to go faster.

Update

Ian has really gotten excited about his new bike. He even went out on his own this afternoon and was riding around the block. The best thing for him is that it has “gears”. (The Kona has a rear derailleur with six gears) When we moved here, he didn’t like riding just on the street, because his little red bike was hard to pedal up the road. Now he can climb hills really well. Big high fives!