Giant Demo, Off the Chain!

The Ride Giant Demo was 3 years in the making. Due to scheduling conflicts it seemed that it was never going to happen. Finally the date was nailed down and the word started to spread. Everything was coming together perfect, tons of folks RSVP'd, so it was on! And then we started checking weather.com. Outlook not good...rain, rain, and more rain. We kept saying well maybe it will miss us. No such luck (in the voice of the dude from South Park with the voice box thing,"mmm, it's coming right for us!). It was cold, rainy, cloudy, and just plain gross outside. But that didn't stop a huge crowd from forming. I have never seen so many people in the shop at one time. My dad was heard saying, "I'm feeling a little overwhelmed!" We probably had 100 people come through the store on Sunday and over 40 seized the moment despite the weather. Folks were waiting up to an hour for a chance to demo one of Giant's Maestro dual suspension MTB's! And the wait for a carbon road bike wasn't any shorter. To keep the crowd from revolting Kim and I stayed up late Saturday night cooking up some grub. 35lbs of chili was made and 4 of Kim's famous "green cakes" were baked. Surprisingly enough only half a green cake was left and about 4 bowls of chili! I seriously thought we were going to end up eating chili for a month, so thank you to everyone for getting their eat on! It seemed that everyone had a really good time hanging out and talking shop. Hopefully we'll be able to do it again next year.

I would like to take a second to thank Evan and James from Giant, Kim for coming through with some delicious food, and everyone for toughing it out and stopping by the shop on Sunday, despite the less than desirable weather! I would have snapped more pics, but I was way too busy to grab the camera. Here are a few I took before the mob showed up...