not just arriving. THis place is huge. bigger than huge. it’s very easy to get lost. I set out today to make sure I talked to all the important vendors because I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss them.
Entry level felt stuff looks great. Our sales rep wasn’t handy so we got the spiel from jim felt (the owner).
didn’t really get any face time with kona or jamis so I have to swing back there later but their stuff looks good for this year. barry wicks was there and I bored him with the tale of my first cx race. He’ll be at Granogue, I guess I’ll have to kick his ass.
the new orbea stuff is enough to make me want a $5000 road bike. I usually think that $5000 road bikes are excessive. ANd they are, except for the orca.
-autographs. Here’s me with dave zabriskie, we discussed my basment workshop and the fact that it is called “the manhole” he said this sounded prison like, he wanted to know if we would do the picture cheek to cheek.
Here is thor hushovdt. He doesn’t speak english very well. but he’s fast.
as the day went on, I saw a guy rocking a “septic death” shirt. ANd I thought wow, that’s awesome. that dude must be old-school. and then I looked closer and it was bill dillon. APparently he and whitesnake live in brooklyn now and run an online courier zine called mess nyc. it was rad seeing them and they told me about an alleycat they were throwing.
I was bikeless, but they said they were trying to get people to do it on demo bikes. I ran to kona and got a hold of jeff and he was into the idea, but I needed the bike in 20 minutes so it didn’t work out.
Next step, call tiny. He brought a folder here. Almost seemed like it was going to work out, but it didn’t. Ryan calls me and wanted to come hang out. I was outside with the race folks, I told him that to find us all he had to do was go outside and look for the black t-shirts.
Here’s some pictures from the pre-race drinking.
He is a super knowledgable mechanic who has TONS of FG info on his website. There is a slight chance it wasn’t him, but I’m pretty sure it was. I was going to go talk to him, but really this is how the conversation probably would have gone:
