my name is mwd

Laura and I headed on down to the NEC Bike Show last week – Laura does a good job of putting up with my bike habit, for which I’m very grateful. The show was quite fun, and an opportunity to sit on lots of new bikes…

You can see some pictures from the day, but they’re mostly just pictures of me on various bikes :) Some of the new bikes where nice – I liked new Buell 1125R, which has divided opinions on its odd looks, and the BMW X-Challenge was quite nice too. On the flip side, I was disappointed by how uncomfortable the KTM 990 Adventure was, given it gets a big thumbs up from the AdvRider crowd. In the end, nothing convinced me to move on from my Ulysses, the excellent bike that it is (though, were I richer, it might have been tempting to complement it ;).

Bike shows are also a good opportunity to find gear to wear, as there’s not much in the way of options for this in Cambridge. I found some nice potential christmas presents to myself, some good jeans, and Laura managed to find a pair of winter gloves.

But it wasn’t just sitting on static display bikes, I had a go on the Buell Slow Speed Skill Course. Here they put you on a Buell Lightning to tackle a coned course of tight manoeuvres. I was quite pleased with how I did, though I did put a foot down at one point outside any of the obstacles – doh! There’s a higher resolution video of my performance here, or you can watch the you tube version below.

Tackling the cones was great fun, and it’s one of the things you don’t really get to test yourself against once you’ve passed your test.