....it started out just as pure lust. Idle hours spent gazing at
pictures of the object of my desires on the internet, some of them
exotic pictures of solo beauty, a few pictures of twosomes and the
rarer pictures of ones which go both ways. However, like many such
dreamers I knew that my chances of meeting one in the flesh and
getting to properly touch and feel one were few and far between. That
is, until earlier this week when I took the opportunity for a furtive
little side trip to the outskirts of Melbourne in the hope of a quick
ride. I pulled up at an anonymous little doorway tucked away in a side
street and was greeted with an array of such beauty I was quite taken
aback. Yes, the Greenspeed recumbent factory is amazing (why, what
else did you think I was talking about?).
The guys at Greenspeed were very helpful. Mick showed me the various
models and then let me have a test ride on a GT3 along the nearby bike
path. This was my first ever ride on a recumbent (unless you count
that little plastic thing when I was a wee boy) and it was a wonderful
experience - the comfort, the speed, the ability to ride under boom
gates rather than around them :-) I was impressed with how small a
turning circle the trike had. My riding style was a little twitchy but
I'm sure that will improve when I get a proper chance to ride one
(fingers crossed for a big tax refund this year!). They were preparing
a tandem for a customer and it was an amazing piece of engineering,
it's now second on my bike shopping list (it can take a few years to
ever buy items on this list, if at all). They don't make the solo/
tandem convertible recumbent which I thought looked so impressive on
their web site, but Mick's explanation for dropping it did make sense
(a pain to build, low sales and similar in cost to a separate tandem
and a solo).
So if anyone's ever even thought of buying a recumbent, have a trip to
the Greenspeed factory and it will convince you!
Graeme