Our November Schedule is as follows:
Sundays – November 4, 11, 18, and 25 – Noon to 4 PM
Tuesdays – November 6, 13, and 27 – 7 PM to 9 PM (closed November 20)
Thursdays – November 1, 8, 15, and 29 – 7 PM to 9 PM (closed November 22 for Thanksgiving)
Saturday – November 24 – 10 AM to 4 PM – BLITZ! for Holiday Wishes Program
It is getting toward that time again – the BLITZ! for the Holiday Wishes Program will be here soon. This is where we have a marathon session to repair as many bicycles as we can to fill all the orders for the Holiday Wishes Program sponsored by United Way and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. We don’t know how many requests we will get yet, but it usually is around 20 bicycles. Come help us make someone’s holiday dreams come true and help us fix bicycles on November 24. If we get them all done, we will work on our orders, and if we manage to get all of those done we will repair bicycles for future orders. I think the record is fixing around 20 in a day, but that was several years ago before we had a store so I don’t have records.
As for records, we have surpassed last year’s bicycle give-away total. Last year was 678, this year we are at 696 and will easily break 700! Every bicycle that we give away bumps the record up higher. This would not have been possible without our terrific volunteers – Bill W, Tom Y, Tom R, Tom L, Marie J, and Kendra M are our core group, with occasional guest appearances from Bill C, Sean S, and Bob H. We appreciate them so very much, and so do all the people who receive bicycles.
Looking ahead, we have offered our services to Free Bikes 4 Kidz to help clean up at their warehouses after they finish giving away a few thousand bicycles. We did this way back in January in the east Metro and it was a blast. I will post here and on our Facebook page when these events will happen. We go to the site and tear apart all the junk bikes left behind and salvage any parts we can reuse. This makes moving out so much easier for the FB4K folks, and gets us a bunch of goodies. You don’t need to be an experienced bicycle mechanic to do this, just be able to use hand tools and you can handle this. We don’t know if dates will be in December or January, so watch this space.
Thanks for your business. We really appreciate it.