Archive for June 29th, 2010

There and back again, a bloggers tale…

As we neared our destination – the 10th Horizons Unlimited meeting – I wondered if it was going to be any good. It took all of about 2 seconds after pulling up at the entrance to realise this was the real deal. We were greeted by a field full of  colourful tents, equally colourful people and some rather amazing looking motorbikes.

This was only our second event as vendors and our first HU meeting so I don’t have much to compare to it to but I must say I was impressed. The organisation was excellent, the people were friendly and there was always something going on to keep you interested and entertained.

Talks were held throughout the event covering everything from first aid on 2 wheels, GPS for travellers to stories of epic adventure including Paddy Tyson’s – An Italian bike. Being new to off road world I’ve had to seek outside help here. I’m doing my best to immerse myself and get up to speed though, so please be patient. Before  long I might even know what I’m blogging about. So among the 600+ strong crowd were people like Jacqui Furneaux, below, who also spoke at the event.

Other well known faces to be seen were Austin Vince, who for un eductated people like myself, has been around the world twice on the Mondo Enduro & Terra Circa adventure motorcycle expeditions, Simon Gandolfi who as I type am being told travelled from Mexico right down through South America on a “pizza delivery bike”. I’ve just read the article…wow! That is truly inspiring stuff. If I’m ever going to do something even close to that I guess my CBT would be a good place to start.

A few of the other highlights from the weekend included the roadkill cookout, the warm, sunny weather(you could be forgiven for thinking that Summer had arrived), the motorbikes, including this 1994 Electraglide Classic Harley-Davidson – the worlds most travelled motorcyle – belonging to Peter and Kay Forwood and the television in the pub. I only bring this point up as I was able to catch some of the Ghana vs U.S.A game and see at leats one African team flying the flag in this years World Cup. I’ll try keep mention of football to minimum on here, if I can, I’m not making any promises though…

While Satmap has been around for a few years, the Satmap GPS unit is still a relatively unknown product in the off road world so this event was the perfect soap box for us at Azcari to spread the word and make people more aware of this excellent piece of kit. The response was amazing really , with most people – when overcoming their amazement – asking why they’d never heard of us or where we’d been hiding. All in all the response and feedback from everyone was very positive with several sales confirming this. It seems with this event that we’d really found our target audience. Now we just need to keep the momentum moving forward and build on the weekend’s success.

Well I think that’s the first proper attempt at a blog out the way. Hope you enjoyed it.  All feedback would be greatly appreciated. This has all been quite a big learnign curve and I hope and expect things to get easier from here. And on that note folks I’m signing off. The table needs setting and bellies need filling. I’ll upload more photos from the weekend later this evening. Zed

A few of the interesting panniers on display