It's Raining Bikes!

The bikes are in. Well, ONE load of them. 378 bikes to be exact. This is the first shipment of MANY Bikes for the World will be receiving from our recent partnership with Dick's Sporting Goods (DSG).

For one week, to kick off Bike Month, DSG held an in-store promotion accepting trade-ins for money off a new bike. Those trade-in bikes were in turn generously offered to BfW from DSG.

In each of their 481 stores, customers were able to trade in a bike when purchasing a new one. We love this deal not only because we are awaiting over 3,500 bikes, but because a new bike will hopefully get a cyclist riding a bike even more! This is why we love partnering with bike shops...it's a win-win-win, for programs overseas, bike shops, and the local rider.

Thank you to everyone who came out to help with this first shipment...Bob, Craig, Phil, Adam, Paul, Keith, Nick, and Yvette. They braved the weather, fought the traffic, wrestled with the bolt seal (don't ask) to make this first shipment roll without a hitch.

The weather did prevent the truck from pulling closer to our storage area and therefore our makeshift 'dock' but thankfully the truck had a ramp. So we rolled the bikes right off the truck and against the building.

Most of the bikes needed more processing, but thanks to DSG staff not much. They did a great job removing the pedals and attaching them to the frames with cable ties. They also turned the handlebars and took off some training wheels (thank you!) BfW pitched in by finishing up the final processing tweaks, counted the bikes, and stacked them inside to join the others soon enough.

In this shipment we found bikes coming from Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, even as far away as California (but we suspect that might have been from someone who moved). And the quality of the bikes is AWESOME! We don't know where these bikes will be heading yet, but with this many bikes, maybe ALL of our partners! They will certainly be in West Africa and Central America possibly by this fall.

On Wednesday we will be preparing to receive TWO shipments in the same day. We are hoping for sunshine and dry ground so we can pull the trucks closer to the old gym. Ideally, we would like to be able to roll the bikes straight from the truck to the gym, that's one of the reasons we process the bikes the way we do.

People often say, "wouldn't it be even smaller if you took the wheels off?" Well, it doesn't save a TON of space to do this AND you have to carry the bikes to load. And remember our shipments are over 500 bikes so that's a lot of carrying. And don't be fooled by those 'small' bikes, some of them are the heaviest ones!  So that's why we leave the wheels on...we like to make our volunteers' work as simple as possible. Hope to see you out there soon!