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Background

I first got interested in getting a trike while reading a blog (Dropsafe) by another computer security geek. This guy had bought himself a KMX trike and every now and then wrote about how fun he was having.

Personally I definitely do need the excercise. Having three small kids in the house tends to limit my amount of free time in the evenings. So getting a trike and try to ride to work seemed like a good idea. We will find out if this is viable, the commute will be 43km one way and I am seriously out of shape at the moment.

The hunt

Getting from wanting to have a trike to actually having one proved to be much harder than expected. Especially since I did not want to spend both an arm and a leg. A trike is expensive enough and I am still not 100% sure this is something for me, so I wanted to buy a cheap one. A search on the web faield to find any used ones for sale in the vincinity. I felt that I had to test ride one since it would cost a fair bit of money.

I was unable to locate any store in the area which carried trikes (or even any recumbents) but then there was this busniess trip to London. After a lot of googling and emailing (why are some places so bad at answering email?) I located Bikeworks where Jim turned out to be very helpful. I paid him a visit, got to test a TW-bents trike (an older model) and ordered one. Unfortunately it turned out that the UK distributor (probably uk-recumbent-bikes) had stopped dealing with those so the deal fell through:-(.

After some more googling I found OutdoorExperts.de. They resell the TW-bents trikes under their own name and after a brief email exchange I got an offer to buy a Vidda. Which seems to be their rebranded version of the TW-Bents Mantis for 1300 euro (plus 150 in shipping). This was the cheapest place I found which actually could promise to deliver within the not too distant future. They said they would ship it approximately three weeks after they had received payment. I could not find anything negative on them on the web so I gathered my courage and sent them to money. In the end it turned out that they shipped the trike after 19 days.

Last modified 2008-07-30 21:48 by MaF.