Here she is now! Sorry for the crappy indoor pic, it's pouring rain outside. I wasn't feeling the brown with the orange, and I wasn't sure where to go with it. I looked through the "orange bikes" threads for inspiration and found drillium dude's trio of orange beauties and fell in love. I'm not too proud to go for a straight-up copy, but although I love the look of Unicanitors (probably my favourite looking saddle) I only find leather saddles comfortable. The Brooks Swallow is a compromise between the two, since I think it's fairly racy looking for a Brooks and it's very comfortable once you dial in the angle. I was very lucky to pick up a matched set of alloy TA bottle cages, they suit the bike and they are LIGHT.

Looks aside, by far the greatest thing about this bike is the ride. Unfortunately describing ride-quality is like describing wine, it's very subjective and the English language (or my grasp of it anyway) doesn't seem to have the right words. The Inuit apparently have a hundred words for snow, but I can only come up with a couple for describing how a bike rides. The Behringer only really revealed itself after an hour or so in the saddle. I kept looking down to see if I was in a lower gear than normal, which I wasn't, because I was flying along without any effort whatsoever. Some wizardry in the frame geometry or construction has given it magical properties of propulsion. I swear if you could get it to stand up on its own it would pedal away by itself. The handling is incredible. Zipping through downtown traffic it does exactly what I want it to, and I feel much more confident weaving between cars and making sharp turns. I won't call it the Perfect Bike, but it definitely is for me. Another Behringer owner wrote that he had sold all 60+ of his bikes except for his Behringer, and that if you ever see one you should grab it because it would "change your life". I laughed, thinking how ridiculous a statement it was. How could a bike possibly change your life, after all? And yet...