The Bikes
When we got back from South East Asia our old hard-tail mountain bikes needed quite a bit of work. Most of the drive trains needed to be replaced and the cost to do this was surprisingly high. During the trip I had spent quite a bit of time tuning derailleurs, especially after the times we had put the bikes on buses or song thoews. While we had no real problems with how the bikes had handled, Leigh's would need quite a bit of work to set it up for carrying more gear. So new bikes were always in our thoughts.
In May 2012 a Polish cycle tourist called Eugeniusz Szulik stayed with us for a few days. Instead of the usual Cape to Cairo (or vice versa) he had chosen Poland to Port Elizabeth. His choice of bicycle was a Rohloff hubbed Thorn Nomad and it really impressed us.
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So in November 2016 we ordered two Thorn Ravens from Thorn Cycles in the UK with Leigh's being a Step-Through. The service we had from them during the ordering and sizing process was really good and the bikes just felt “right” from the first moment that we settled our bums onto the saddles. Of course we had to give them names. Leigh settled for "R&R" (a Red Raven with a Rohloff) which is best reduced to "Argh" (as in "To err is human, to argh is pirate") while my bike got saddled with Zebo, named after my first dog who was also black and nondescript (Zebo was a brand of stove polish for coal stoves back in the 1960s).
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