I biked to Sports Basement and spent a bunch of time in front of the exhaustive display of fancy water bottles. I’m sick of the plastic taste coming from plastic-taste-free bottles, mildly perturbed by the whole BPA thing, want to carry more water, and would like my water bottles to look a little more spiffy.
I’m also trying to avoid looking like a camelback-wearing toad. I’m already annoyed enough about how my backpack feels while I commute 5 miles… do I really want to feel like that for 50 miles? And the back-acne…… meh. I suspect that I’d be happy with a camelback or similar reservoir if I could strap it to the side of my rack and keep my back free. I’d have to stop every few hours to take a breather, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Pretty much, I think of camelbacks as silly affectations of the sort of mountain bikers I won’t want to be like. Also, it is still is made out of plastic and can’t be dishwashered.
Now, I’d seen on some of the bike marketing websites the Zefal Magnum water bottle. It’s plastic, holds a whole liter of water when most normal bike bottles stop at 750 mL, and is made of plastic… which is what I’d been trying to get away from. Also, I’d have to order it.
See, For things-that-go-in-the-nuker, like my lunch containers, plastics rule. But for everything else, plastics suck. Aluminum or stainless steel are both much more durable. So I found an non-sigg-brand aluminum bottle that was also 1L but still fit into a normal bike bottle cage. The extra nice point is that it’s fairly close in color to the bike. I also spotted a blue bottle cage and had to resist the temptation to replace my black bottle cage with blue ones.
I found that I couldn’t fit two of those 1L bottles, so instead I got a Klean Kanteen 800 mL water bottle to fit in the other slot. The funny thing here is that Klean Kanteen sells a bottle cage designed for their bigger bottle, but it fits in my existing one just fine.
Which leaves me with 1.8L of water at easy access…. about the same capacity as one of the smaller camelbaks and a marked improvement upon the way things were, given that I’ve got a couple of randomly sized plastic water bottles.
Now, when 1.8L isn’t enough, I’ve got a 1L Sigg bottle that doesn’t fit in my bottle cage that I can bungie to the side of the rack and I’ve got an accessory loop cap for the Klean Kanteen so I should be able to completely eliminate the “Oh crap, I’m running low on water” moments by carrying even more liters of water without looking like a toad.