THE BIG IBIS ROAD TRIP V2.1 PART 1 IS UPON US.
The Sprinter loaded with bikes is leaving the building soon, next week to be exact. The first round of trip will take our driver from Santa Cruz to San Diego to Denver to Little Rock to Atlanta to Boston and then back across the top of the country to Sun Valley. After the 4th of July we’ll add a lot more, including Downieville, both Mountain Bike Oregon’s and a lengthy swing through OR, WA, and BC.

Here’s what the first part of the route is going to look like, clicky for bigger image:

We’re working on our exact schedule, and we’ll announce that soon. While this route might look to you like a “Texas Avoidance Tour”, it’s not. Our friends from the Lone Star State got a visit from us last November, where you might recall we found exactly one good cup of coffee.

In the mean time, we have two Demos coming up immediately.

This Sunday and Monday, Trailhead Cyclery of San Jose will be sponsoring a demo at Santa Teresa Park down there south of San Jose. We’ll be there with a full compliment of bikes. You can call Trailhead to make an appointment to ride the move coveted models, and here’s where the demo will be held.

The following Saturday, May 8th, those of you in the Sierra Foothills (Auburn to be exact) can ride some Ibises in a demo sponsored by two of our dealers. Velo City Bicycle Center of Winters CA and Bicycle Engineering next door in Davis are sponsoring the event. For more info, see the blog post here.

It is with great pleasure that on actual 4-20 I present you all with a picture of Chris King marketing manager Chris Distefano. He rode in Saturday’s Gran Fondo at the Sea Otter. Here is the number they gave him.

If 420 isn’t your thing, perhaps beer is. Here are my favorite socks of this year’s Sea Otter:

On the way to the Sea Otter I spotted this on the back of a MoHo (motorhome). I particularly like the misspelled word, not the 800 one either.

Busy busy busy day yesterday at Sea Otter. But the day before might have been even busier. The Fox 2011 media launch happened Wednesday for their tasty new Talas 160mm forks and they used Mojo HD’s as the test bike.

Ten lucky journalists became the first non-Ibisians to ride the HD. Editors are often guarded about their feelings on products, but I detected quite a number of smiles on the faces of these guys. I think we’ll have pictures soon.

I managed to shoot one crappy iPhone photo from the top of the van that transported us up to the Santa Cruz mountains where we tested the bikes, er, I mean forks.

You don’t see that yellow bike in the middle. And if you did see that yellow bike, you’d see that the duct tape on the down tube says ‘NOT A STOCK COLOR’, so there is no confusion.

We’ll tell you about yesterday’s events later. Maybe tomorrow.

It finally happened. No, we’re not talking about the ‘outing‘ of BikeSnobNYC.

We are talking about the shipping of the first production Mojo HD to a dealer. The lucky recipient was Cal Coast Cycles down in San Diego. Here’s a shot of HD Numero Uno (that’s how they say it down there by the border) last Friday after a guy in a brown truck dropped it off.

Beside the foreground subject, what I really like about this photo (which was shot by Greg Lambert) is the subject matter on the back wall of Cal Coast…A nice little lineup of Mojo frames, nicely blurred in Greg’s photo behind the HD.

How did Charlie Skerlecz, the owner of Cal Coast manage to get the first HD? You might think it’s because he totally kicks ass as a dealer, or because he has twenty something Mojos on the wall at any one point, but no, it wasn’t that.

Cal Coast’s philosophy is to not carry a ton of different lines of bikes, but do a great job at representing what they do carry. And that’s just what they do for Ibis (so do a lot of retailers by the way, we just happen to be talking about this one today).

But that’s not why either. Tom Morgan (see below) and I were down visiting Charlie a couple years ago. Charlie was asking us what was new and upcoming at Ibis, which happens to be something we never reveal. We didn’t say anything but Charlie persisted in quizzing us. Of course the HD was very much on the drawing board at the time. While we didn’t tell Charlie we were actually coming out with what was to become the HD, Charlie figured it out and gave us an order right there on the spot, no details no pricing no nothing. He believed in us and knew he could keep a secret, so we took the order. Fast forward a couple years and here’s a picture of our Ibis president Tom (6’6″) handing our lilliputian brown man the very first HD.

Production goes relatively slow at first. And we’ve got a huge backlog of orders. Huge. We and the factory are working as hard as we can to get orders filled. So we ask your patience. Thank you.

HD’s are rolling.

Yet another reason to look forward to my next trip to New York.

Loving the dirt jumping in t-shirt and tight jeans at 5:30 and 8:45.

The whole thing is worth watching though, although you can skip the first minute and a half if you’re short on time. Click on the picture and you’ll go straight to the video.