Goodbye Seaview Ave

It’s been a while between posts, so whats been going on?

Well the title sums it up, it’s been 3 lovely years but the time has come to say Goodbye Seaview Ave.

It is amazing how much has happened under the Hobart Bike Kitchen banner since we got started and Gus convinced Liam that a few bikes in the backyard and some friendly bike maintenance was a good idea.

We’ve literally passed on hundreds of bikes, we’ve held a Sunday Session virtually every weekend since then and have had a wonderful time doing so.

Liam has been a generous and understanding landlord and his support has enable HBK to find it’s feet, and to prove that there is a need for, and community support for what we’re doing.

Liam is now travelling around and wasn’t going to be onsite as much so we needed to give the backyard back to the vegies and the animals.

Taroona has been a great venue for HBK as the community has lots of people who have liked what we’re doing and come along to get bikes or learn skills, others have donated and it’s been really positive.

However, we do recognise that it works well if you’ve got transport to get there or your bike is working but if you need to get a bike for transport then we’re a little hard to get to. So we’ve been looking to find a more central venue that you can get to easily.

Also we like to get ourselves setup a bit better in terms of storage, work areas, coping with bad weather, …

So we have been looking for another venue. We have a venue which we’re sure will be great but are still working through planning/building issues before the new site is up and running. More details when we can. So in the meantime we wont be running Sunday Sessions or taking donations.

Please have patience with us as we’re very busy behind the scenes getting this established.

We also hope to run some one-off sessions at various venues. So if you are organising an event where you’d like some friendly bike maintance vibe please get in touch and maybe we can work something out.

So to sum up, this is not an obituary, Hobart Bike Kitchen is moving on and changing. We hope to bigger and better things.

It is a chance though to thank Liam for all his support. I’m not sure if he envisaged what HBK would grow to but I do know that he ensured that HBK got off to a good start and that our efforts will mirror his in the promotion of all things healthy and cycling.

I’d also like to thank everyone who responded to our request for help with the packup and move. We’ve accumulated a fair bit of stuff in our time and assessing, packing, loading & unloading it was a task beyond the core group of chefs in the time we had. But that is an example of how we see Hobart Bike Kitchen, it isn’t a bike club for a few backyard bike repairers it’s a community of people who want to support more people on more bikes in a friendly, cooperative, supportive, sustainable way.

So please stay in touch, come back to the site in the near future for updates on what we’re doing and please come along and join us when we’re back to normal service.