Tracey and I exchaged gifts this morning. She got me fiddle lessons and with a guy in one of the bands she plays with and a book of violin songs. I got her an old english ten speed. She had never ridden a bicycle before so we took it to GGP to begin teaching her. It was a shakey start but once she got over her fear she learned to ride without my help. We looked kind of ridiculous as I ran along beside her, but we made a lot of people smile so who cares. When we went to the bike shop to buy a helmet someone came in and actually tried to buy her bike. The sales guy had to check to see if it was one of their bikes for sale. I must have done a good job cleaning it up! Tracey is in love with it and has named it Sir Theodore Baxter Notingham, Bax for short. She's lookin forward to putting a basket on the front, and going on the Mystery Midnight Bike Ride, and I can't wait to finally learn to play the violin. So far this has been a pretty good Christmas!

I have a touring bicycle that I've equipped with a mountain triple crank. The smallest gear on this crank is 22 tooth, which allows me to spin up just about any hill unloaded about three gears from my lowest gear. My cassette is an 11-32 9-speed which means I could have an even lower gear by changing to an 11-34, but a 22-34 gear would barely have me moving at all. It makes me wonder why most touring bikes come equipped with those cassettes. Sure, the 44 tooth big chainring doesn't quite cut it for unloaded downhill ass-hauling, but when loaded it still gets me fast enough to feel dangerous. I tend to treat my chainrings like uphill/flat/downhill ranges, so the overlapping ratios aren't very useful to me.

My thinking is that widerange cassettes are best suited for double chainring bikes, or perhaps MTB racers who don't have time to shift to their granny gear every time they need to climb. They might also be useful for road triples with relatively big low gears. But for loaded touring it seems that having close gears that are spread across widely spaced chainrings would be a much better idea. Close gears mean fewer instances where a gear is just a little too high, or too slow, and if you're in no hurry shifting chainrings isn't that big of a deal.

I think I'll stick with my 11-32 speed cassette and maybe replace my big ring with a 48 tooth to get a little more high gear.