New Beater Bike for Daniel

Recently Daniel's company had asked the employees to voluntarily participate in a program called LEAD. The program was about teaching employees to be better presenters. They were required to partner with someone else in the company and give 2 presentations that would be scored by their peers. They also received points for attendance. The incentive was the winning team would each get $1000.

Anyways, Daniel and his partner kinda of cheated and used me to design their presentation (I guess cheating is the wrong word since there were not specific restrictions). At the time, I jokingly told him that he would have to share his winnings with me if they won and he asked me if he could buy a commuting bike so he wouldn't have to ride his mountain bike to work.

Last week we found out that his team won. We were pretty excited. He has been keeping his eye on the classifieds for sometime for a bike. Ideally he wanted a beater that he could park outside and not be afraid of someone trying to steal it. Before the $1000 came in to play, he was "earning" his beater bike by calculating how much he saved on gas each time he rode his bike to work.

Well today he found a possible bike for $100. Since he had rode his bike to work today, he didnt have a way to go look at it or pick it up. So I ended up picking him up and we ended buying a 95 Trek bike for $100. I am glad that he didn't spend $1000 on a bike:)

Atlanta, Birmingham, Dave Ramsey & Trek Bikes

This note is a condensed version of the last 3 days for me and Daniel.

Thursday we left Charlotte at noon to head to Birmingham to meet friends and hear Dave Ramsey speak. We hit Atlanta at 3:30. How a city can have traffic on a Thursday at 3:30 is beyond me. I am glad that where we live in Charlotte does not require us to sit in traffic for ridiculous amounts of traffic for ridiculous amounts of time on a daily basis.

Birmingham was nice. It was great to see our friends, Marshall & Hillary. Dave Ramsey was a great speaker. If you have never heard him speak, I would highly recommend him. While I do not agree with everything he has to say, he does offer some stellar "one size fits most" advice on finances. Someone told us that they thought Dave Ramsey was a bit of an extremist. Since most people in America are in debt, I think there is a need for extreme measures for us to conquer this mountain of debt we all continue to build.

Friday morning we had breakfast with our friends and then booked it home. Once again, Atlanta traffic sucked. We made a short detour to see a bike dealership which involved wandering through Atlanta neighbors hoods instead of sitting on I-85 but it still was bad.

We made back to Charlotte with 1.5 hours to spare before Daniel's Dad & Grandma rolled in. We frantically cleaned for 1.5 hours and were still vacuuming when they pulled in the driveway. Talk about an exhausting day!

Today we got up and I cooked a country breakfast of sausage, eggs, bacon & biscuits. This is what Daniel's grandma always cooks for us, so I figured it would be nice to make it for her.

Then we headed toward Belmont where we dropped Daniel's dad off at the Belmont Abby College and then we cruised over to the US National White Water Center where TREK was offering free mountain bike demos. We had 45 minutes to test Gary Fisher bikes on the 7 miles of mountain bike trails. The bikes were full suspension and rocked. I dont know if mountain biking on my crappy, cheap mountain bike with no suspension and terrible shocks will ever be the same.

We need to go spend an ENTIRE day at the white water center so we can kayak, rock climb and mountain bike - now that would be a fun day. We just need to drop $5000+ for 2 really awesome bikes... what would Dave Ramsey say???