I have a beautiful bike. A Surly Cross Check. And I ride it almost every day to work. We have one car for our family and my husband, a stay-at-home parent uses our car during the day. So, I generally use my bike as a second car. We bought a house in an ideal neighborhood so I could commute to and from work more than half of the way on a trail. I ride on pavement and gravel so my current setup is great. I used to do long rides with my husband and we both bought cross bikes for the gravel we road on. Overall, I love my bike but I think I may need to upgrade to make it into a total car replacement for me. For that, I need help!


Terrain and weather seem to be my biggest obstacles. I live in a seriously hill place and our driveway sits at the top of a quarter-mile hill. This makes hauling groceries and/or my toddler up that hill seem too much. It also makes riding in crappy conditions that much more crappy. We also live in a place with winter. While it doesn't snow all the time like in the Chicago area where I grew up, it does snow and get icky. I ride rain or shine now - barring a severe storm. I would like to ride year round (barring particularly snowy days where I can use backup transport) and be able to haul groceries up that damn hill and occasionally a kid. I would also like to be able to go to hillier parts of our area - including some gravel roads - but it gets daunting to the point where it isn't super fun anymore to keep up with my husband on his carbon bike with a triple.


I have a few options in mind:

1. Upgrade my surly to a triple, replace my tires with fatter, knubbier tires in the winter, and add fenders. The downside of this is that I can't get disc brakes and I'm not sure a triple will solve all of my problems completely but it's been so long since I've had one that I don't really know!

2. Buy a new bike with disc brakes and a triple that can also take big tires. I think an LHT would fit this, yet? Are there other models (particularly steel models) you could recommend?

3. Buy an ebike. I would love this but I'm struggling to find something reasonably priced (3 grand or less) that also has a small enough frame for someone my height (I'm 5' tall and ride between a 47 and 50 frame right now on my cross check and past road bike). Most target people of 5'4'' height or 5'6'' height and since my reach is so limited, it wouldn't work.

4. Turn my Surly into an ebike. My LBS is discouraging this because they said the supplier they used to recommend to people has gone out of business and they can't find another reliable supplier as of yet. They think my bike should be able to handle it just fine but they're concerned about who would supply the hub motor and battery.


Ideas? Suggestions? Any hilly commuters here who find it to be the biggest barrier to success? I want to make this work year round. I just want to keep loving it rather than wanting to rage quit half way up our hill.