We've moved several times since I first got into cycling avidly. So even if I wanted to be loyal to one particular shop, it wouldn't be practical. I live in Australia now, several of the bicycle shops I've frequented in the past are in Canada. We move on.

We also travel a lot, and if we need something like tubes, we're not about to get a shop in Canada or Australia to mail tubes out to a small town in France when there's a perfectly good shop right there.


In our current situation, we live approx. 100 km from bicycle shops. So we've got 2 choices ...

1) Go to the shop when we're going to one of those towns for other reasons, and hope they have what we want in stock. If not, they offer to order it for us and tell us we can return (200 km round trip) to pick it up in 6 weeks.

2) Order online and have what we want delivered to our front door within a week, for less money than what the shops have it for.


We don't always use choice #2 ... if we happen to be visiting a town with a shop, and if we need something, we might drop in to take a look ... but choice #2 is our most frequently used choice.


And fortunately, Rowan knows what he is doing when it comes to bicycle building and repair.