Bikes from Walmart and a cycling trip.

Walmart is offering new Ozark Trail bikes.

 I like to keep my eye on the bike offerings from Walmart because I like their Ozark Trail brand of bikes. They are cheap but very useable bikes. I currently own three of them and like all of them for what they are and what I use them for. The three I own are the Explorer G.1, Ridge M.2, and the Fat Tire bike I think its called the Ranger. I ride all of them for different reasons and find that at what they cost they are very good bikes to own. The Explorer is my favorite bike they offer and it is the one I ride every day and on all of my long rides. It has yet to let me down even though there have been some problems none of them are bad enough for me to dislike the bike. At a cost of 250 USD I do not mind riding where I would not want to ride a more costly bike. Riding in the rain sure what ever, to the store absolutely, or maybe in the woods where it was very much not made to go? YUP that is not a problem. I feel the similar about the other two bikes but they did cost more. I got the Ridge to pull my kids in the charriot and the Fat Tire bike I got to ride in the middle of winter. All three of these bikes fit right into the cost vs useability. To be clear about this I put all these bikes together myself and made all the adjustments to things myself so no Walmart employee set anything up and I did not have to face weird set up issues from the store. Except for the factory putting the sticker on the Fat Tire bike on the fork wrong. The front was rear and the rear was front according to the sticker but I tested riding it backwards for a while and it rode fine. That is a story for another time though. The point here is Walmart bikes can be cost effective and provide a good ride. 

Walmart has some new offerings for bikes and I can not fathom where they are getting their cost justifications from. I am going to start with the one that I think is at least closer to the right price the Ozark Trail FS.3 Fastflow. So the Fastflow is a full suspension bike wih some not too bad components such as hydraulic 180mm disc breaks and a 120mm Air fork. These are very welcome upgrades to the line of bikes Walmart offers and could be better than their other full suspension bike the Slalom. The only thing is its 400 dollars more than the Slalom. The reason I think this is not the worst is they have a few bikes in this line already you have the Ridge, the Slalom, the Vibe, and now the FastFlow. Sure they are all a little diffrent in what they are for but this are Walmart bikes talking about a downhill bike vs a dirt jumper is not going to be something most people shopping for a Walmart bike are going to care about. So when they see the prices of them and notice that the fast flow is 898.00 USD they are going to just not buy it. Anyone who is looking for a bike in the 800 dollar price range is almost for sure better off getting a bike from a bike shop that set it up right so they dont have to worry about that. That is not saying that this bike is the worst deal but its just far too much money for a Walmart bike to cost knowing that an employee who is over worked could be setting this bike up. There are also the other bikes in the mountain bike line that are much more worth the cost. I could see people buying this one knowing what it is but I could see sales on this bike never matching what Walmart assumes the sales will be. The other new bike is a different story. 

The second bike Walmart is offering is the Ozark Trail G.2 Rebel Pro. I have had been keeping my eyes out for what they were going to offer for a new gravel bike for a while as I love my Expolorer G.1 so much. This bike has a lot of very welcome upgrades from what I see on the website. Though there are also some odd things with it that at the price really confuse me. This bike has machanical pull hydraulic brakes and a carbon fork. The other odd thing is there is no other bikes in the line that I can see other than the Explorer and the Rebel Pro. So when I saw this listed on the Walmart website I got excited but then I saw the price and just had to laugh. This bike currently 898.00 USD or 648 dollars more than I bought the Explorer for. I would recommend the Explorer to anyone looking for a cheap gravel bike but the Rebel I am having a hard time finding a reason to want it. Knowing that the fork is carbon and even though there might some Walmart employees that know about carbon fiber my guess it that this fork will be the cause of a lot of issues. Even is this one is online only I bet the fork will still be a problem on this. Small cracks in the carbon fiber can cause some big failures and over tightening the wheel could be the casue for cracks at just the right spot for this to be a problem. I am not saying carbon fiber forks are a problem in general they are a very good and lighter than other forks but if you do not know the limitations of it or what problems can happen with it then it can be a problem. Again this is Walmart with out dedicated bike techs so if you ask them if a scratch or crack is fine on this fork they might just say yes thinking its like an aluminium fork. Then there is the machanical pull hydraulic brakes that come on this bike. They knew that hydraulic brakes were something people wanted but they went half way and picked machanical pull hydraulic instead of just going all the way and putting hydraulic brakes on this bike. The real kicker here I could put a carbon fork and hydraulic brakes on the Explorer for around 300 dollars. I would not get the 1x drivetrain the Rebel Pro offers but its not like that is special I could upgrade the rest of the Explorer for cheaper and get better parts than the Rebel Pro offers. I could see someone buying this bike but for the cost it would be better to get something from a bike shop that sets everything up properly and has better more trustworthy components. It also loses one other thing that makes the Explorer special. For the cost I would not ride this bike in the rain, I would not feel as comfortable locking it up at the grocery store, and I would not take this through the woods like I do with the Explorer. 

All of this being said about these two new bikes they are offering I have not rode either of them. I do not plan on buying them at this point either so unless Walmart sends me one for free I will not be riding these. If they offered these at closer prices to the other bikes it might be something I would consider but not at the cost they are currently. 

Cycling Trip!

Now that my rant about Walmart bike prices is over I really wanted to talk about my recent cycling trip. I was able to drop the kids off at their Aunts house for the day so my spouce and I were able to get on our bikes and ride for the day and explore. We do not have a lot of people that have time to help us out with the kids because they are all busy with their lives so getting a whole day to cycle together was something very special to us. 

I planned out the ride and the idea was going through a few trails marked on Strava that I saw other people riding and thought it was going to be a good ride. The start of the ride was a rocky mess for 3 miles or so. I was riding the Explorer Gravel bike thinking that it was going to be more single track so I was riding the wrong bike for the area. This was not going to stop me from riding though I was kid free for the day and wanted to hit the dinner spot I mapped out so we pushed on through. After about 3 miles I got to the point where it was flat and found a few cool things there was a ramp made out of a log and 3 foot high skinny that went over a little bit of mud. 

The gravel bike took this jump just fine and was a lot of fun to ride and find in the middle of the woods. The skinny was another story. Before you see the short video I did not notice that my camera was on the wrong settings until after I went to edit the video and was wondering why it was a bouncy glitchy mess and it turns out that it was trying to record 4k HDR with no stablization.... 

So I was riding that and it does not look as high as it was but part of that is my issues with the camera. Either way I was half way over it and got afraid of falling off as I was not straight and heading off the side. I decided that a bunny hop to the side off of it was the best idea and I mean that part worked out well but in my infinite wisdom I forgot that my gravel bike has drop bars and I was on the hoods so all of the downward force went right into twisting the handle bars and they ended up shifting down and I went into the log... I had my toolset with me so I was able to get things back into the right position and get riding again. After the skinny was about another mile of just flat packed gravel and the end of this trail. 

After the end of the trail it was time to do the longer part of the ride on the road to dinner. It was about 15 miles of road riding along the beach to get to the dinner location. The area we were riding in was a little more annoying than I thought it would be though. There was not a lot of areas for looking at the sea it was a lot of houses and big walls of private property along the coast. There were a few areas of public veiwing that the city graciously allowed the public to view from... 

My normal riding area if I want to ride along the beach I get to see the ocean the whole way and even when there is very expensive mansions along the coast the way they are set up is different and you can still see the water line and there are a lot more areas you can just get off your bike and go swimming if you like. I was not a big fan of the way this city had their beach views set up but they were pretty when there were some. 

Finally we got to dinner and I splurged and decided to get some chips with my dinner and they were perfect. Crunch, salty and what ever that sauce was added perfectly to them. The hamburger I got was a hamburger nothing special but good. 

After dinner it was time to head back to my Aunts house and we went a different way back to see if there was more of a view of the ocean. There were a few spots but overall it was mostly just road riding looking at houses and dodging cars as we rode. 

Over all the ride took about 5 hours with dinner included. The one thing that is a little confusing is the 50 mph where I think that either the watch glitched out for a second or something. I was going down a large hill but I really doubt I hit 50 mph on my gravel bike but whatever. It was over all a perfect day for a cycling trip and a much needed long ride. Final stats for last week were 11 hours of exercising and I feel awesome. 

I am off to continue riding my cheap bike unless I get a free one from Walmart. Thank you very much for reading have and wonderful day!