I'm leaving bikes...

It’s official.

I’m leaving bikes behind.

For the first time since the late 90’s, when I was either delivering pizza west of Chicago or working at a youth hostel in Switzerland, the bike business, in whatever form it may take, will no longer be my main focus at work.

It’s time

It’s been fun, worked with a lot of really wonderful people, some of whom, even 20 years later, are great friends. I learned a lot, not just about bikes but also the business, both the tourism side and the buying and selling of them.

Lately everyone seems to be buying Ebikes.

Not a fan of the Ebikes.

Watching people bike around, distances that they could easily have done before, now getting a little fat and lazy.

Perhaps that’s unfair, maybe I’m getting old. Becoming Abe Simpson…”Old man yells at cloud”

But post Covid the things are everywhere…

…I digress, apologies.

I think I burned out.

Not only with what I did.

But in trying to get it back, in some form post Covid.

That’s gone.

Accept it.

So for many reasons I am leaving bikes and moving into boats.

Gonna learn how to fix them

Still, not leaving the two wheel game entirely behind. Going to keep working a day or two a week at FlagShip Bike Tours as a mechanic. We’ve got a little over 100 bikes so there is plenty to do.

But that in combination with my full time job as a bike shop manager plus trying to help some friends with their tour ideas just became too much.

Since January of last year I’ve been doing at least six days a week. Sometimes more. I took a day off after the Nine Inch Nails at the end of June. My next day off was my birthday at the beginning of August.

That was too much.

All the same, I’m glad I did that. Last year was the first full year that the bankruptcy wasn’t taking a good sized chunk of my paycheck.

I had taken a pretty good hit.

So when I saw an opportunity to get a bit back I dove in.

Got a little bit ahead of where I was.

But it was a bit much.

There were days cycling to work where I knew if I shut my eyes for ten seconds I would have fallen asleep at the wheel.

So when things changed, rather suddenly as they often do, in January of this year I took a good look at my options.

What I’d done, what I could continue to do and what else was out there for me.

Flagship’s main business is boats, 50 of them, specifically doing tours throughout the city. The bike tours I joined were brand new last year, so I’d gotten in on the ground floor with that part of the company.

But like a bike company that grows. You may start out renting bikes, giving some tours and all that. Pretty soon you’re fixing bikes in your fleet as well. Soon it grows so that you can fix local people’s bikes as well, expanding your business.

I’ve some experience there.

Well, with 50 of their own boats there’s a large warehouse and dock keeping that fleet in operation. And like a bike shop, you can expand and fix other people’s boats as well.

So that’s what I’m going to be doing.

A day or two a week of bikes. The rest of the time with boats.

And it’s normal shifts, Monday - Friday.

I’ve had that only once in my working life. During Covid when I was a bike mechanic working in a big warehouse while the world outside was shutting down.

And it did shut, here in the Netherlands there was not only a lockdown, bars and cafes closed as they instituted a nationwide curfew as well.

So having weekends off then really didn’t matter.

Nothing was open.

Now it is.

Think I’ll be checking out this life thing I’ve heard about.

Normal shit.

Weekends free.

Yeah.

After hitting my head…

…its time