It was a long and uninteresting series of events that led me to ride my daughter’s Breezer Downtown EX down the side of a mountain, but here’s the important part: It was fun.

An outing during a family camping trip that went a little bit differently than expected found us at the head of a fantastically fun single-track through the Selkirks of southeastern British Columbia, me on a beautiful full-suspension mountain bike, she on her beloved yellow urban ride, complete with basket and blinking lights.

I convinced her to trade bikes with me, partly because I thought putting her on a proper mountain bike would be the safe thing to do on a mountain-bike trail (I didn’t neglect my fatherly responsibilities completely). But partly because I relished the thought of crushing a mountain bike trail on a teenager’s city bike.

Hence, I found myself cresting tabletops and rounding berms at full-speed, fenders bumping along and V-brakes squealing under the strain. I feel like I should tell you that this is unadvisable, and you should not do it.

But in the midst of this ride (which, not coincidentally, was a heap of fun, especially seeing the looks on the faces of other trail riders on $6,000 carbon-framed full-suspension downhill rigs who did double-takes on my basket), one thought kept popping into my head: Do you really need a mountain bike for this?

Of course, a proper mountain bike is the right thing to use, for safety and enjoyment. But the experience got me thinking that perhaps we North Americans have let our gearhead tendencies get the best of us. Cyclists, in particular, seem to obsess over having the “proper” bike for whatever kind of ride they are doing: A road bike for a country road, a mountain bike for a trail, a city bike for a city ride. It’s getting to rather absurd lengths when it’s now possible to buy a bike specially built for gravel rides.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a sucker to the n+1 philosophy of bike ownership as much as the next bike nerd (a formula stipulating the ideal number of bikes you should own, in which n is the number you currently own). But riding a totally inappropriate machine down a trail and having a blast doing it reminded me that maybe we don’t need a different bike for every ride. Maybe sometimes having a bike that’s good enough is, well, good enough. Maybe we should stop subtly shaming people who show up for a group road ride without a proper road bike, or who ride a hard-tail on a rocky trail. Maybe, ultimately, the ride is more important than the machine we ride on.

But then again, maybe I’m not thinking clearly because my brain got rattled on that mountain bike trail. Man, front suspension would have been nice.

Also published on Medium.