Monday 3 September 2012

The Sun is Out!

Here we are just completing our first month! Woo hooo! Very happy we are certainly underway, operating and getting into the swing of things. 


We had a beautiful weekend of Veggie Velo life, with a successful day trading on North Terrace on Friday (thanks to Darren for getting the replacement gas bottle, oops, and to the lovely customers who didn’t throw alfalfa sprouts at us when we ran out of gas) then a sunny day in Hindmarsh Square, followed by an evening service on Ebenezer place in front of Treadly Bike store.


In the last couple of weeks we have served a really diverse range of customers, all of which have been an absolute pleasure to deal with, making us smile from sun up to sun down. We were happy to be at the Focus Cycle cross event in the Adelaide park lands in the past week also and discovered a little night life while trading on Ebenezer place for the first time. Excellent! 






And in the past fortnight we received our first reviews! (or at least write ups). Rip it up put an article in the paper about us (SO GOOD!) and now we feel a little more like Adelaide is getting used to seeing us around, even if people still stare when we ride by. 


We also had a nice photographer from the 'Adelaide Matters' magazine stop by to take some photos of Manu. Looking forward to that one!



Looking forward to summer and extending our trading days and hours. It’s going to be fantastic! Its such a pleasure to work standing on the street with our customers, rather than being behind a counter for example. We get to chat to our customers and LOVE hearing their ideas, comments and questions. 

  
Thanks to everyone who lets me take their photo. It makes our day that we get to see your happy faces!

Lately the more common questions have been… “Do you actually ride that here?” We take it as a compliment that we look like a little shop rather than a mobile bicycle, but yes Manu actually rides his shop to work! Here is my (so far) only video of him on the go. 


 And a few action shots...



 (The above one is Dan Kouriah making it look easy!)



 Below is a photo of my Dad on Manu's vintage Dutch cargo bike, showing us how its done. (Tweed ride 2012). Cargo bikes are beautifully designed and are easy to ride. The 'Manumobile' as its becoming known, is really really heavy. As its the first he's designed he's had to experiment and use trial and error, but overall its a heavy beast. We estimate its well over 100kgs (maybe around 200kgs) when loaded in the morning and its tough pushing it up even a little hill. Manu is always dreaming up improvements and even a new bike in the future, and it will keep getting easier.

Questions like “Where will you be next Wednesday, and can you come to Victoria Square?”  are also common.

The answer is soon we will be extending our trading days to more than just 2 per week. We will always update our blog and facebook page to let you know where we will be each week. And yes we will come to Victoria square, we are currently working out when, but soon! 

We are busy planning other awesome locations as well, and will soon be putting them on the map! 

So that’s this little blog post summed up, our life is quite full of Veggie Velo at the moment and we love it. All the support from everyone makes us feel grateful to live in such brilliant city, and to be serving such great customers. 

Thank you all so much!