Hi All:
The move is on, the 23rd we are arriving to Santa Barbara!.................WOW!.........That is just 2 days from now! Yes! We should have been in the U.S months and months ago? But one thing lead to another and another, one day the house was sold, great! The day of closing, the buyer slipped out of the deal.......Then came April 30th!...Oh hell! It's Queens birthday so lets head up to North to inventory some old stocks. What happens within the next few days was not our intention nor did we think we could pull it off, we dreamed of it but always thought, ''NO WAY!''. We'll we did it! We closed the deal on the '' BIG SCORE! '' We took the lot!.........The whole warehouse!.......Less the warehouse of course! We could not ''BELIEVE!'' it until our next trip there. 3 weeks later, the 'BIG!'' road trip, Demark, Sweden then Noraway!......We got a 9:00 AM ferry to catch the next day so we high tailed it out of Holland, slammed through Germany then '' WHITE LINED '' it straight through Denmark! It was nice seeing the Danish countryside in the.....dark!! Cecile and I took turns driving up while the kids were hanging out in the back of the motor home........6:00 AM the next morning we arrive at the ferry, ok we'll grab a couple of hours of sleep, just when we were starting to catch up with a few badly needed ZZZZzzzzSSss preboarding goes into motion, OH!.........S&^%! 2 hours later and we're on the ferry so we catched a few ZZZzzSSs then. We arrive to Sweden then we're off to Norway........28 hours later we finally arrive to our final destination. OK!...OK!........Where do we start?!?!?!? Looks to be about 20 containers worth of goods, lots of good usable stuff that fits well into our program, but then again there is a fair amount of so so type of stuff. There's the ROVAL wheelsets! Was to be 50 sets sitting up in one corner of this warehouse, cool!.......Ok! that was an item to control, this was not to be. I found 20 sets there and a batch overthere and a line of clinchers there....Ok, I think I got them all now. While walking around this place I see 4 boxes overthere and another 3 boxes there, the writing reads ROVAL. I take a looks and each box contains 4 unbuilt sets. Ok, that's the lot.....I hope......Looks like it's going to be an interesting 3 years to come, yep 3 years to completely finish this deal.
BTW: Many months ago I spoke to Jan Heine about MAXICAR and the situation of MAXICAR hubs. We talked briefly about trying to have them start up small runs of hubsets once again, perhaps 200 pairs for a run.......It came down to, If we were able to get MAXICAR up and running. Jan asked what would I ( We! ) do for freewheels, that was the last time we spoke........For us I already knew this answer, NORWAY! With this deal we now have control of 6000 plus freewheels, not much in Regina ORO type of stuff but lots and lot of other types of Regina, maillard, Atom, Suntour and Shimano. To back up some of these marques we'll have lots and lots of cogs on hand to build up a needed freewheel. Cogs, we'll have a very good selection of Maillard, Shimano ( Early Dura Ace ) Regina ( CX & America and some Corsa )........Suntour and others being spotty. We have been stock piling cogs well before this score.............So to say, were set for freewheel stuff. Part of the long term plan. One other thing, with this score...............there looks to be 1000 pairs of high end hand built wheel sets, I asked why so many wheelsets? The owner said, during the winters we have not much to do.....so we build wheelsets and bicycles....This is what I was told, nuts, nuts and more nuts! As for MAXICAR, Jan said that they ( MAXICAR! ) was in the market of selling the name. Now I wonder if someone did buy the name, would they produce hubs for the buyer of the name and so on........Of course I never got the $$$ amount. Just another dream to start dreaming about. As we speak........................A few other projects are coming off the drawing board............Need to make room for other........Opps off to the thinking tank.............The bath tub.
Back to the move, today we ship a long awaited 40 ft container....a customers container. Soon after we will receive another truck load. It was to arrive today but was delayed..........the truck driver missed his ferry out of Sweden! So to say we're a bit on the ''HAPPY SIDE!'' Once the truck arrives and it's gone................we're then off to the airport................See you there.
BC Baron C.....................And the gang!!....................Gobbling up everything in our path!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Renaissance cycles, Eindhoven Holland.........Once in the U.S...........hopefully we'll be back to normalcy...........And also to catch up with lots and lots of loose ends.