Gainesville Bike Shop Tour, Mental Health Day #1

In order to keep from punching somebody in the side of the head and going to jail, I determined that a Mental Health Day was in fact, long over due. So much so, that I took two of 'em! (you already heard about MHD #2) I decided that on Thursday, I'd head on down to Gainesville and visit the bike shops that feed the drunken student population of the state's flagship institution of higher learning their bike fix.

Observations...

First, Gainesville is a %$#-Box. I know that college towns typically have a bit of a high-traffic, heavily-used feel to them, what with (in Gainesville's case) over 40,000 students all milling about the town, drinking and puking and generally acting like crazed farm animals. Still, on the %$#-Box meter, Gainesville stands head and shoulders above other college towns I've visited in my years. I've been to Blacksburg (Virginia Tech), College Park (Maryland) and Georgetown (Georgetown...duh!), and of course I lived in Boulder (Colorado), for over a year. Gainesville just has an overwhelming feel of disheveled, broken-ness, as if only half the light switches in the city work, and most restaurants score a 65% on state health inspections and feel proud to do it. 'Quirky' and 'Filthy' are not synonyms, Gainesville. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to come clean and claim South Florida as my 'nourishing mother', and point out further that as a graduate of a competing state institution (in dollars allocated anyway, if not in football!) I am duty bound, as any graduate of USF, FSU or even Florida Gulf Coast will tell you, to talk badly about the University of Florida and Gainesville in general. Gainesville deserves special mention for making it so easy to talk badly about it. Thank you, G-ville, for being such a total dump. Hugs and Kisses , etc.

Anyway, while I was there I had the joyful opportunity to visit 6 bike shops, and even get 'thrown out' of one (and I wasn't even drunk or covered in my own vomit, fancy that!) So in the next few days...to string out this post even longer in the hopes of getting more than 4 people to vote in my Blog Poll...I'll post up some pictures of the shops I visited, and even rate them on an as yet determined 5 'star' scale.

Again, thanks to Gainesville for being such a colossal pigsty. Stay tuned to learn if that pigsty-ness carries over into their bike shops. I can't speak for the restaurants...I'm not eating out in that town...