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.



My highlights of the day were that I got to meet Steve Peat, the DH World Cup Champion, I found myself randomly standing next to Brit Freeride star, Gee Atherton, so said hello to him and mentioned about a huge snow jump he had done in Tignes where the front wheel had completely collapsed, coming down hard when overshooting the landing. Just quite incredible really. On a different note, the DIRT stand and the MBR stand had the best non bike related eye-candy. I enjoyed chatting to Adrian on the DT Swiss/ Pace stand who had previously ridden some of the route we are planning including some of the Santiago Compostella Pilgrimage route and the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route in America. He obviously shared our enthusiasm and seemed slightly envious.



The show had a large area dedicated to dirt jump stuff which obviously reflects the explosion in its popularity. In general it wasn't especially busy, although it is expecting more people tommorrow on the Sunday apparently. We relaxed for a bit and watched some of the trials stuff which is always jaw droppingly impressive.

If things go according to plan we should hopefully get some more coverage for our expedition and charities from the top mountain bike magazine and there are some potential sponsorship opportunities there as well. All in all a good day out.