Tried the twenty-niner thing today..

Not for very long. I have long been curious as to what all the 29er fuss was all about and I finally went out and touched one in the flesh. What did I think? Meh. It was a Gary Fisher.... no. Wait. It was a "Trek"  Mamba The Gary Fisher brand has been reduced to a stencil of his initials some where on the frame. It's a sad day. I didn't like the blue and white color. The kid said that they had black. OK. I thought that the price marked on the bike was fair. I took it out for a spin. The first thing that I noticed was that it was BIG! Compared to the 26 inch MTBs that I have ridden over the last twenty years (poorly and infrequently: i still consider myself firmly a beginner) I though the the bike was too tall, the wheels took up to much space and that the bars were too wide. It handled slow. Even with the much-vaulted G2 Geometry it was a slow steering kind of thing. Maybe, for a 29er it was a scalple bit compared to a G2 26er... not so much. It was just plain slow. Push the pedals and... nothing. Now, I am certainly no racer but even to me it was plain that the 29er would take more to get going and stopping than a 26er. In fact, stopping kinda sucked. It sucked SO much that I asked the sales kid if the breaks were set up to be delivered or if they needed final adjustments. He assured me that they were ready to go. And they might have been, but they weren't ready to STOP! They were mechanical disks though, maybe that is a reason that they sucked more than rim breaks? It's funny though, because that was the one part of the experience that I had a pre-conception of superiority about. There definitely, definitely definitely DID find superior about the big-wheel. It went over obsticals that would have stopped the 26er dead in it's tracks, or at the very least required the use of "skill" to surmount. It was OK. I'm not sure that I would buy one over a 26er though. Bike for bike that cost more, weigh more and are less fun to ride. They do scale yellow curb stones better though!