The holidays (Thanksgiving to Christmas) are a thing to factor into any plan. I'd encourage checking out some other games in the meantime (there are a lot of awesome board and card games out!), or adventures (you've done Mines and Hoard already as well?), or having someone do a quick home campaign.
It is a bit unfortunate though. I did a lot of LFR because of the sheer breadth of options and ease of play, and AL has definitely gone another direction. I am happy it didn't just copy PFS. Different styles of OP is actually really good, so that people can play something that suits them most.
Yeah, I factored the holidays into my plan. I assumed a 3 week gap in running at the store.
I just didn't expect no new adventures for January and February. The thing is we are trying to run D&D Expeditions weekly at a store to help build a community. I'd like the players in the city to be rest assured that any week they decide to come, there will be a game there waiting for them. I want it to be more casual than a home game so people who can't make it to a weekly game can come once a month or once every two weeks and still play. Meanwhile, I'd like the people who WANT to come every week to also come and have fun.
This is how we ran LFR and LG and it worked fine for both of them. I'd like to get that experience back, but there is likely a lack of adventures to make that happen.
I'd love to play some other games. If it was up to me, I'd just skip the 2 months and take a break from running and do something else until new adventures come out. But I'm afraid that after 2 months of the game being cancelled I'd run into players who didn't get the message that it was cancelled showing up and wondering why we weren't there this week. It's likely after 2 months people who forget to come back and we'd lose half our players. In order to hold the community together we have to keep doing things weekly.
So, it's likely that we are going to run the Starter Set adventure for the people at the store. Though, the adventure is going to feel disjointed and likely lose a lot of its fun since we are going to randomly gain and lose players. I'm not even sure how to run it properly as an AL adventure. I mean, I know all new characters have to start at level 1. But I'm not sure if you can start playing with level 2 characters from AL at the beginning of the adventure. I don't know if the entire adventure is level 1-5 and therefore I should allow people showing up with their level 5 characters who have played D&D Expeditions or not. I'm not sure how to hand out XP to people who miss half a chapter. If I allow level 2 people to start the adventure, then I'm not even sure how to give out XP for the first chapter since it says "Don't give out XP for this chapter, just make everyone level 2".
The problem is that Lost Mines is officially allowed in AL but doesn't fit in well with the AL rules and there are no clarifications anywhere.
Either way, running Mines for the 2 months we don't have adventures this time will work fine. But likely won't work the second time there is a 2 month gap since everyone won't want to play it a second time. Hopefully there will be another solution before then.