Good news, gooder news

Well... wolf good news wearing sheep bad news clothes but pretty much all better than okay news.

I so wanted to take the 32" wheel Vassago Maximus Ti (Meatplow V.11?) to at the very least a place like DuPont before heading out to Utah this week, but weather and related trail closures and Shart Tarck and Florida and a lack of desire to do any last minute packing led to this about a week ago:

I just felt like I had too much going on to leave this experiment till the last minute.  AFAIK, nobody has said they could fit a 32" bike in a standard bike travel bag.  Just a shit ton of guessing and conjecture that it most certainly wouldn't... but then again, 97% of everything being said right now about 32" wheels is guessing and conjecture.

If the wheels didn't go in with the tires mounted, I was going to have to remove the tires, rinse them out, get them dry enough that they wouldn't get all stuck together inside the bag, and be prepared to reverse all that when I got to Utah... and do the same procedure on the return trip.  

Or just take my 29er and be happy because I used to love that bike?

Stubbornness prevailed.

I had to let out ALL the air (valve core removed), force feed the thing into the wheel slot, reinstall the valve core, and then reinflate to somewhere around 7psi in the hopes that the bead will stay mounted... all of it inside a giant garbage bag in case that fails.  Yeth, it really is stretching out the wheel pouches,

and yeth, I've had to have a seam repaired (or was it a zipper?) on my EVOC travel bag once before...

hopefully I don't mess up my bag... again.

This bike is going to the Single Speed aSSault on True Grit Epic, despite the fact that I'm not so sure rigid is quite the ticket in Utah, but whatevs.  It will still be shits and giggles, I know some of my fellow single speeders want to throw a leg over it, and Dirt Wire Thom wants ALL THE CONTENT.

The gooder news being that I ended up going to DuPont on Saturday, but I wasn't about to take the 32" bike outta the bag and put it back together for just one ride to have to repack it so...

I assumed there was a logical gear on the Vassago Optimus Meatplow V.10, but I was wrong.  I had no idea that the last time I rode it was back on January 4th, after the Winter Shart Tarck trail work day, at the Winter Shart Tarck course.  That meant Shart Tarck gear, not WNC gear.  I didn't look until we were loading Dr Mike's grumbler, so I convinced myself to go grab the tools and sundrious things to shift my gears when we got there.  A decision that was easily arrived upon when Dr Mike realized he was in the same boat as me.

No ride in DuPont on the 32" wheels, so no real riding it outside of Charlotte before just taking into the unknown terrain of Utah, but...

I rode my 130mm forked 29er for the first time in over two months.  This would be the gooder news part.  I still very much love this bike and still consider it my most versatile and fun bike I own.  I expected it to be awkward to go back to 29" wheels after two months of almost nothing but 32", but it wasn't even a thing.  I really gotta give Vassago Tom credit for doing all the maths to make my bike fit similar and making the handling differences negligible.

That doesn't mean that I wasn't a little bummed that I didn't get to throw the big wheels down Hooker and Ridgeline, but oh well.

I can now put away all my concerns about owning two redundant single speeds.  I really do have horses for courses (we won't talk about the Vertigo Meatplow V.7... shhhhhhhh).  

Talk back atcha after I get back from