Saturday, April 28, 2007

National Bike Show located at secret venue called the NEC

Today we drove to the National Bike Show at the NEC after generously being giving some tickets by the organisers. I was up early and went over to pick Tom up at 8.30am to drive down. We collected our previously prepared (at midnight last night) press packs and printed a couple of cheap t-shirts with the Ride Earth logo and website on them. Eventually after the usual faffing about we headed off with some circa 2000 Pete Tong tape playing in the car.

We cruised on down the A14 and M6 then missed the turn off for the NEC by just the 5 junctions. To make things worse when we turned off in order to turn round, the southbound direction was closed and the traffic was diverted so we had to drive another junction up the M6 just to come back again. After an intense session of cursing about the lack of clear signage, we managed to find our way to the NEC by using the sun and the art of tracking.

On arrival we milled about for a bit, before being walked in by the organiser and left to do our thing. We spoke to a few different companies who had stands including Chain Reaction, Extreme.com, Pace/DT Swiss, Merlin, and dropped press packs off with Singletrack, DIRT, MBR and a few others with a view to getting some regular coverage on our trip.