Great stores in Hong Kong or Singapore or .......

[John Rogers]

Back in thee day, well way back when I was still in the US Navy I would usually make a list of shopping places I would want to visit when we pulled into a certain port such as Hong Kong or other great place to shop. In 1984 my oldest daughter and I were racing bicycles very hard core so I planed to visit "Wings" shop on the mainland side of Hong Kong to get some Campy Super Record bits and also the brand new Shimano "click shifter" for my daughter. Sure enough they hard what I wanted and the prices were about 60% or the cost in Italy or the U.S. so I bought several sets of shifters and Campy Super Record bits and as soon as I got home they went onto my Daughter's Bill Holland road bike and also onto my Vitus criterium bike which I had bought I France.

In our first races there was a lot of looking and talking and so on and I was able to win a race in Ensenada MX which was a blast! My daughter won the "teenagers" race which was boys and girls together as that shifter sure helped! Now day there are electric shifters and all sorts of goodies.

Have any of you guys gone through things like that?

[look 171]

No nothing cool like that from overseas but I have a bunch of boring bike racing stories.

I have to ask, did you and your daughter raced up here in LA back in 84? There were only a hand full of young women (jr) racing up here. I road Jr in 84. I was dropped like a bad habit during district road race. I don't know if you race up here, but that was the tough Acton Road Race.

I visited Asia about 20 years ago. Hong Kong was one of my stops. Off I go to the local bike shop. The hot shot, division 1, British pro, David Miller is from there and he talked about some of the shop in HK. I visited wing's and a few places.

Went to see Alberto Masi under the Vigorelli Velodrome in his dirty old shop in Milan(which I loved). I wanted to get a custom bike build by him but found out the tariff was too steep for a poor young bike nut, I decided to pass on the opportunity. I did have masi himself (though not by his famous father) measure me up and gave me dimensions for his frame. That was too cool. I still kick myself thinking back for not getting the frame made.

I never owned a Ti frame when they were the talk of the town in the late 90s. Again, it was too much money, plus I could buy a Cannondale CADD 4 frame for 400 bucks with the club discount, beat on it and throw it out instead of spending 2000 bucks on a Ti frame. Last year on a training ride, an old friend said that he saw a Ti frame on sale in craigslist, so I looked it up as soon as I got home. The same day, I drove down to Irvine to buy it. As it turned out, it was a beautiful Merlin Extralight leaning against his garage door. I bought it on the spot. He's from Macau so his English was limited but enough that we understood each other just fine. We yapped about old bikes for a bit and he decided to open his garage and show me some of his collections. Holy siht, he had about 30 pro frames hanging from his ceiling and show cases filled with rare Campy gruppos. I saw a blue Colnago C40, their mid to late 90s lugged carbon frame ridden by the famous Mapei team. It was my size and I could never afford something like that back then. I always wanted one, so I sold my soul to buy it (went to Bank of America and pulled out what he wanted). He had a pro shop in Macau and was going home to open up shop again later that year after his girl goes off to college. He was trying to get rid of as much as he can because he didn't want to ship all that across the pacific.