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After I “outgrew” bikes when I was a kid way back in the early 60’s and answered the call to become ateenager which, at that time,
meant learning the Twist (and I did this well, even winning a Twisting contest at Grant Park High School in Winnipeg), cultivating a wave that shot out from my forehead about the distance of a generously visored
ball cap (a feat accomplished by squeezing a line of Brylcream directly on to the comb and combing it in), and being cool in the halls of the school to the point where my vocabulary consisted of litter more than
“big daddy,” “pep,” “cool,” “man,” and the occasional grunt – and let’s get it clear that riding a bike was considered really square: if you didn’t have wheels, you walked, took a bus, or stayed in one spot forever
– after all this I went through a long labyrinthine journey out teenhood and into adulthood and arrived at the age of thirty to a point at which, once again, it was OK to ride a bike. In fact, it was cool to ride a
bike. This was sometime in the late 70’s around the time I turned 30.
I bought my first adult bike – a Raleigh Grand Prix with Heuret derailleurs – at Savages Bike Shop in downtown Fredericton. It was a beauty. It cost two hundred bucks, and I hate to think what a bike of that quality would cost today. An old friend of mine, Wayne MacKeigan, bought a Raleigh Record and we set off on a thousand mile bike trip through Canada’s Maritime provinces – New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
It took us two weeks. We ate apple pie with ice cream every couple of hours and I still lost ten pounds. I got the best tan of my
life. I learned exactly where to hit a dog on the nose with a bicycle pump to persuade it not to chew my legs off. And I learned that traveling on a bike is a thousand times better way to get to know the places
through which you travel than by looking out the windows of a car.
We met lots of other people who were biking. A woman whose name I forget attached herself to us for a couple of days and then drifted
off in other directions with a long-haired bearded man who claimed to be a day-by-day work of living art. Personally, it seemed more to me like con art. We spent a few days in Charlottetown with an old friend and
traveled from there to Cavendish Beach each day for sun, sea water and beautiful women in bikinis.
Most of the people we met who were on bikes were having problems with them, mostly with stripped gears, flat tires and faulty
brakes. My Raleigh took to the trip like a cool breeze skimming over hot asphalt, even with panniers loaded down with nearly 80 pounds of camping equipment, food, clothing, repair kits and other stuff.
Just before I left for the trip, I had taken the bike into Savage’s for a tune-up. I swear they waved some kind of magic wand with
spokes over it and made it impervious to breakdowns.
I had that bike for years and always took it back to Savage’s for repairs and tune-ups, and I came to appreciate the fact that they
people who worked there had one very important thing in common: they loved bikes.
They loved bikes so much that they learned everything they could about them. They respected the art of traveling on two wheels with an
engine between your legs. They rode on bikes themselves. They raced bikes. They lived for bikes.
When my Raleigh finally died after trying to jump over a telephone pole, I bought another bike. This time, I went cheap and bought a
10-speed from a department store. I had lots of problems with it. The gears sucked. The brakes sucked. The tracking sucked. Theseat sucked. The tires sucked.
The bike sucked.
I took it back to the store several times, but the people working there were students and part-timers who were given a quickie course
on bike assembly and didn’t have a clue about how to tune them.
I missed the service I used to get at Savage’s. So I took my bike there to get some work done on it. Not only did they do the work
(and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg), but they noticed that one of the handle grips was missing and they put on a spare set they hadlying around. They didn’t charge me for the grips.
I bought my next bike there, a Norco Pinnacle. They practically gave me a crash course in maintaining it before they let me walk out
the door with it. It came with a one year tune-up warranty for when the lines loosen and the bike starts to settle into the rider’s personality. It’s the kind of thing you won’t get at most other places, mostly
because the staff won’t have that wealth of knowledge about bikes.
I guess that’s the biggest difference at Savage’s - they sell and service bikes and bike accessories. Just bike. Not camping equipment
and canoes and snow boards and skis and footballs and baseball equipment…just bikes. And they ride them. They ride bikes.
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