Despite All My Rage

Apparently I got a little carried away putting my bottle back in the bottle cage on a ride last week.

This is a Specialized Rib Cage II, which has in most regards treated me very well over the years. It holds the bottle securely, it's easy to get the bottle in and out, and of particular importance for this bike: it's white.

The white part is important, as this bike also has white bar tape. When putting together a colour combination for something like a bicycle, it's important that each colour is used in more than one place, so as to provide a sense of cohesiveness across the whole design. Without the white on the bottle cage, the bike just didn't look right.

The simple solution to this broken bottle conundrum would be, then, to simply purchase a new Specialized Rib Cage II in white.

But they don't sell it in white anymore. They only sell it in black with white (and other) accents, and that's not really good enough for my situation.

So, I decided to go in a different direction.

This is the Specialized Rib Cage III Carbon. Yes, a bottle cage made of carbon fiber. It's not quite all white, but it's got more white than the current lineup of Rib Cage II, so it'll have to do.

So far I've found it quite easy to use, though it feels like it might not grip the bottle quite as tightly as the Rib Cage II. That said, I haven't seen any signs of the bottle wanting to bounce out of it, so I'll come back to this point at some future date if that trend shows any signs of changing.

It does, thankfully, have enough white on it to pull the colour scheme together again, so that's nice at least.

And yes, it does cost a silly amount of money. Silly in bottle cage terms, at least.