2008 Teams and Beyond

The Goose Creek Cycle team actually got a little press in the Courier journal last week, but since then a lot has happened. The roster will look a lot different in 2008 as we are adding riders quite quickly. We just signed a group of 5 new road riders who are already used to training and working together. The group does include one Junior who we should expect to see great things coming out of in the future. Also a couple of Cat 3's that should give us more of a presence in the local scene.

It looks as if we will also be adding a couple of mountain bikers for the 2008 season. I will release a full roster as soon as we get it all finalized.

We are also in the middle of releasing a "Club" team that is focused on local and natioal riders who enjoy the sport and ride a lot but would not typically be candidates for true sponsorship deals. By end of season we will convert that team over to the current jersey and you can look to see a new jersey design with a new list of sponsors for 2009.

All and all very exciting stuff. Even for February. See you all out there on the road.

Ahh the Joys

So it has been kind of slow at the shop customer wise, but there is plenty to keep us busy. It seems like we are hitting one fiasco after another. Our printer stopped working in the move, so we got behind a day in shipping while we went and got a new one. All of out gridwall shipped, but we found out after the fact that they were backordered on all of the mounting brackets, so once it arrives we will have no way to hang it. Our tire display shipped, but went to the old location and the moving company couldn't get the truck in there so I had to go pick it up in my station waggon, which was a trick considering that I just had surgery and can't lift anything over 10lbs. We still need to regravel the neighbors parking pad which we had to dig up when the water main broke. An issue with the citys new sign policy has caused them to suspend issuing sign permits for the next 4 months, so getting a sign up will be a bit of a trick and golly it would be nice if people rode bikes in February because customers walking through the door would make all this a lot easier to pay for.

Anyway, these are the joys. To pass the time we are going to start doing trainer rides at the shop which should be fun. See you all out there

It is starting to look like a shop

Ok, so it doesn't really look like we are open yet, but it is getting closer. It my gimped out, not allowed to lift over ten pounds state, it is going a little slowly, but thanks to some help from David we have gotten the shelves built in the stock room and more of the product is tagged and out on the floor. We did have a couple of firsts today that I was excited about.

First #1: The shop phone rang - Sure it was a telemarketer, but whatever. Really, how do these people get you numbers so quickly.

First #2: someone I didn't know walked in. Sure she was looking to find out what happend to the store that was in there before us, and she never actually got all the way through the door, but whatever it is a start.

So hang on to your hats folks, eventually someone is going to come in and buy something.

Open... Sort of

We have now moved most of the product from the internet end into the new shop now and we have the doors open. This by no means means that we are a fully functional shop. We are still short some things like a cash register and most of the diplay cases, but if you need a small part, or a repair we can do that. Once we move the computer system in we will be able to take credit cards, but for now we are taking cash and checks. Please feel free to come by and check us out, we don't have set store hours yet as we are kind of in and out picking up supplys as we need them, but after today someone should be out there most of the time. Once we get settled we will set up real store hours and we should have a grand opening in March sometime.

Oh how far we have come...

This almost doesn't look like the same building, but asside from some minor finishing work and installing racks etc. the inside of the shop is done. Now that the interior is safe for people to walk around in, we will be "open", and people can come in and hang out, check out the shop etc. As you can see the inventory is a bit limited, but as of today much of our online inventory has been moved in, and I have started to build some bikes.

Also note that Lane has been hard at it as well. If you look closely at the far end of the shop there is a pile of jackets. Lane is fast asleep in that pile.

Random interlude...

Ok so enough with all the updates about the shop for a minute...

This is what happened when Santa told Lane he couldn't have another bicycle for Christmas. It wasn't pretty and he still hasn't recovered.

Fixing the floor

Any time you pull up flooring to expose hardwood underneath, you are taking a gamble. Our gamble payed off mostly, but there are definately some areas that needed some work. Because the floor is 80years old we were unable to match the wood exaxtly, so we improvised a little. Actually the end result turned out to be a lot cheaper than replacing flooring and will look okay in the end. We had long since given up the hope that the floor was in good enough condition to refinish, so we are simply going to paint it. The replacement wood for these repairs was salvaged from other parts of the building that we are taking out. The smaller patch was actually part of a windowsill in a wall that we removed. The larger plank was cut from a sturdier piece of subfloor.