I think it's a good idea to do the test ride under perfect conditions, too. I am the type of person that feels every little change, so I need to minimize those I can control! However, my idea of the perfect test ride in the adjacent neighborhood, that has lots of streets that are loops, with enough rollers to use the gears backfired when it started torrentially raining after a mile! The forecast said it wasn't supposed to rain for 45 minutes-hour and there was nothing on the radar. It ended up being quite funny and it convinced me the bike was perfect, as it did great under those conditions.
Yeah, the bottle thing. My Ariel is so small that I can only fit one cage. However the trunk bag I bought has another holder, which I use for coffee when I ride to work. If I ever go on a long ride with that bike, I will use the trunk bag.
I get that some people get mixed up using GPS (DH is one), but she was snarky to me when I made the suggestion to go turn around and take the intended route. We are talking like 1/4 of a mile back track. To me, it shows lack of preparation. If I am leading a new route, I pre-ride it. I make sure there are no road closures or other funky things. Even the meeting place was a fail; the town had had half of the parking lot closed for a few weeks and the road is all stripped of pavement, as they put new pipes in. Many of the people had to pay for parking or park far away because of this (there was another faster group, so maybe a total of 30 people). I know this because I live in town, but the leader does not. Once you pre-ride a route, there's less of a chance of making the kind of mistake she made. I pretty much left the ride at that point, because of the way she spoke to me and acted. She knows that I live in the area, I am a ride leader for a different group, and given the way her husband died, she should be thinking about minimizing risk.