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Germany 2005- The Business Dave and I travelled to Southern Germany along Lake Bodensee to attend and work the largest bicycle tradeshow in the world, Eurobike. Our German distributor, Cosmic Sports welcomed us into their booth to display a few of our products. Present were the 1x1, Long Haul Trucker with Nice Racks, an array of smaller products and the one and only Pugsley. Let me say, this show is huge and the European market is much different than the US market. Having about 25% of my time to leave the booth to walk around and check out products, I saw some massive 40 x 60 foot booths filled with brand name bicycles I've never even heard of. Not just brand names of city bikes with fenders and generator lights, I mean brands with a full on selection of mountain, road, kids, BMX and city bikes. After 15 years in this business there are still so many things I don't know. There is also a serious lack of creativity when it comes to many of these bikes. High tech, yes. Creative, no. I mean, aluminum this and carbon fiber that gets old. "nano technology" my ass, it's still carbon fiber to me and I know it would last me and my friends about 4 rides before we'd have to retire it to the bike parts garden. Even though I don't care for alot of the new technologies that are out there, it's still very cool that this industry is still moving in the direction of anything NEW. Which implies, at least in Europe, that people are still riding bikes and wanting some of the latest and greatest. So when I wander back to Cosmic's booth to see people glaze over our Surly products, they finally catch glimpse of Pugsley, sitting there in it's purple glory with massive 3.7" Endomorph tires and Large Marge rims. "Vat is zis for?" they ask. I show them the video clip on my camera riding Pug through a local stream in a foot of water over slimy rocks. I reply, "you can ride it almost anywhere you want, rocks, snow, sand, logs". They are mildly freaked out, smiling, and probably have the gears going in their heads of all the local obstacles in their 'hood that they could blast over with this machine. At least we hope the gears are turning in their heads. Having Pugsley there made the entire trip worth it, as it got more attention than the 8 other Salsa Cycles bikes that were nearby and our other bikes combined. With a freaky and expensive project like Pugsley, we sure hope people catch on to it like we have. We learned alot about the European cyclist and consumer. They are fickle, frugal, detail oriented and want to know how much EVERYTHING weighs and costs. Yet so many of them still ride broken down city bikes, hmmm? Part of us being there was to simply show people our name and brand. Here in the US, it seems many people have heard of Surly. Not so in Europe, and it was obvious by the way they pronounced it SH-ER-LEE. So we passed out over 1,000 catalogs and ran out before the 2nd of 3 days was over. We spoke to many people and hopefully enlightened them a little bit on the simplicities of bicycle, not the high-tech complexities. Somebody has to keep it simple. Just knowing there are Surly stickers being tagged throughout Europe right now makes me feel all fuzzy inside. Here are some not-so-bike related things we saw and ate while at Eurobike. I would've taken spy photos of bikes if I felt they were cool, so just think of fat-tubed aluminum or carbon fiber frames and splash some flashy colors on them. ZZZZ, wake up. We were in apple growing country