More on the saddle front (now there's an unfortunate turn of phrase!): I found the Freedom Rely saddle ridiculously cheap. I's supposed to be padded, flexible, and flat, and as wide as my current saddle. It came the other day, and, while it's flat, the padding is quite hard, and it's not near as flexible as my current saddle, but I paid so little for it that it wasn't worth returning.
I was looking at one bike forum after another (I insist that the plural of the online "forum" is "fora", after the Latin, but I thought I'd save the occasional reader the unpleasant surprise of a classical plural formation), reading the saddle threads, and I remember seeing that you've got to try a saddle for a bit to see how your posterior takes to it. Saddles that are initially comfortable tend to be too soft on long rides, and saddles that appear hard at first (including most of the offerings from Brooks) sometimes are the most comfortable. So I pulled out that Freedom Rely, and put it on the road bike. It took some playing to find the sweet spot: the best adjustments for height, setback, and leveling, but I think I have it. I popped out ten miles, and it's pretty good. It's not as good as the BG2, but the BG2 has had years of wearing in... and even the BG2 may have been less than ideal when I first put it on; it was just so much better than the cheapo Selle Royal Viper that came with my first bike that I'm sure I rode it for days, sighing with relief (that Selle was a torture device!).
In other news, I found a way to get a good measurement of my sit bones, without going for an expensive Butt-o-meter testing; the measuring protocol utilizes a curb and a sheet of corrugated cardboard (but because I did it with my pants off, I didn't use the curb). So I tried it... and I got a measurement of less than 10cm (100mm), which seemed far too narrow, given my choice of wider saddles. So I did it twice more. All of the measurements were different, but all were within 7mm, and all were less than 100mm. So why did I think I needed a wide saddle?
The saddle that caused some of the controversy is the Nashbar F1. It gets great reviews (as you'll see if you go to the page)... but it's a very narrow saddle (at 133 mm), and (what you can't see from the picture) where I wind up sitting on it has high structures with hard padding (I don't fit on the flat wide part; I wound up sitting forward of that). It's just not the saddle for me.
Comparing the Freedom Rely to the Nashbar F1 has made me re-think the other saddles I'm looking at. I might really like the Brooks team pro, or even a Brooks Swift (I'm tempted to go with Wall Bike because of the 6-month unconditional guarantee), but I'm also taken with the Velo Orange Model 1 & Model 6 (the Model 6 is narrower, which worries me a bit, but it's held together at the bottom by a riveted doodad; the Model 1 has some artificial fabric glued under there, and I'm afraid it might de-laminate in a few hundred years).
Some of it, or course, is just about the sheer anachronistic in-your-facery of having a retro leather saddle on my road bike (although I've got other stuff like that, too: despite the excellent wheels and drive train, I insist on a steel fork, not carbon; and I like my wired computer rather than the newer wireless). Some of it is about having a beautiful saddle: I did get silver-colored stem and seatpost mostly for the bling, and, while the Velocity Bottle Trap would have solved my problem of insufficient clearance for two water bottles, they are fugly - I went with the Arundel Steel Cage.
And some of it's about ambivalence about buying a bike GPS. I'm almost always lost on group rides (I'm forever saying, "It's always safe to presume that Jim doesn't know where he is"), and a GPS might solve that... but, on the other hand, it's not unpleasant to be dependent on someone else taking charge, even if I'm a stronger rider (and I am, on many of the rides I do). And I know that if I got a GPS, I'd spend a bunch of time indoors seeing what it would do, and sync-ing it up with my computer, and seeing what I could make it do under Ubuntu Linux, and so on... and not pedaling my bike. And wasn't pedaling the point, in the beginning? (I got onto the GPS thing when I heard that the routes for the Anchor House ride will be available for GPS. But I've decided buying a GPs just for the Anchor House ride is a bad decision, and now I'm talking myself out of buying one for all of my other riding, too. And since you're read this far, don't you want to pledge some financial support for me?)
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