Wheel Love Stories

Wheel Love? Hmm… maybe that is stretching it with my 1990 Shogun Prairie Breaker Expert. It was an ok MTB for its time, it’s just that it was way too big for me — I guess you’ve got to make that mistake at least once with a bike. Those were the days before the internet, and MTB magazines weren’t around much either. You just went to a bike shop and bought a bike, often from whatever they had on the floor. Regardless of its size though I really enjoyed exploring the Bogong High Plains on the Prairie Breaker over the first full Summer season I’d lived in the High Country.

I got my first ‘real’ mountain bike in 1988, an Apollo Everest.

After living and studying in Brisbane for a few years it was time to leave behind everything that couldn’t be carried on a bike and ride off into the sunset, destination unknown.

The highly thought out plan meant it was time to ditch the road bike that I’d had a lot of fun mixing it with traffic on the city streets and get something a lot more robust.  A tourer wasn’t my style, but those new fangled mountain bikes were like BMX on steroids, with gears. They looked to be perfect big kid fun machines.