I’ll try and get a more complete review up in the next few days after I’ve had the chance to put my new bike through its paces, but I spent an hour this evening tooling around Bloomington on my new Giant Twist Hybrid Electric Bike. All I can say is: wow! Those hills that I’ve been bitching about to my wife the past few weeks: piece of cake. I got all the way to the office at an average speed of about 15 mph without breaking a shirt-soaking sweat or getting up off the seat to grind. That’s not to say that my legs didn’t do any work, but they weren’t completely paralyzed when I got home either.
In general, I find that the 4th gear does everything I need, except if I’m starting in on a steep hill after a stop sign. There was only one spot where I really had to exert a lot of effort. (And it’s right where I was expecting to). On the north side of 10th Street there’s a bike path that runs along the street between the road and Tulip Tree Apartments. The path doesn’t have a ramp to get across the North Drive (to Hilltop Gardens), so you either 1) have to jump the curb, or 2) run into it and look like a chump. I opted for the second method and had to walk the bike up the curb, then start that 140% incline in first gear. But I still frickin’ did it. Bloomington City Planners: 0. Cyborg-Assisted Bicyclists: 1.
I even got stopped by someone at the corner of 7th and Union that wanted to know more about the bike. He recognized it as an electric bike and said he had one, too. As I was riding off, he ran into a rant about how electric bikes are going to cure our dependency on foreign oil and end all wars. So, I rode back and listened to his crazy ramblings, all the while thinking: this is one cool dude who I totally want to hang out with on Thanksgiving. My bike has already made me a new friend. I’m going to have to give it some extra special electricity tonight.
