planegirlsb said:
How did you pick the Reno out of everything out on the market as the right bike for your Girlfriend?
Funny story on that.
We have a GREAT local bike shop that's a Lemond dealer, and it's a 3-minute drive (literally) from my house. We also have a Performance that's 30-40 minutes away, and I wanted her to try some of the Performance brand bikes.
So we went to the LBS to try a few things, and she rode the Reno and a Tourmalet. We liked the Reno better, because even though it was $50 more, it had a carbon fork, stiffer frame, and fit her better because it was a Women's specific bike (she rides a 53cm Reno, and the Tourmalet was 51cm mens').
Then we went to Performance. She rode a Razza 4.0 and hated it. For some reason it handles really twitchy (I even tested it myself), and I think the super-short stem didn't help things much. It was also WAY out of adjustment because the Performance shops around here can't seem to find decent mechanics. Finally, the store manager offered us an incredible deal on an '04 Giant OCR 1 (Ultrgra/105 components) so we went with that. We got it home and she rode it and the front derailleur almost fell off (they left the bolt loose during the pre-sale inspection) so we returned it and bid them farewell.
We went to another bike shop along the way home, and she rode a few other things, but when we went back to our LBS and she re-rode the Reno after riding those others, she had to have it. She's done a few rides on it, including a 45-mile ride packed with short climbs,
in the rain, and she's looking forward to this coming season.
It's her first serious bike. There's a pic of her on it a few pages back in this thread.