Carole Nash International Motorcycle and Scooter Show

The Carole Nash International Motorcycle and Scooter show is held every year at the Birmingham NEC. This year it ran from the 27th November - 6th December 2009. Trying to find the NEC was fun. Birmingham being Birmingham, it's always a nightmare to navigate even at the best of times. We decided to go on the Sunday as we were hoping it would be quiet and not so crowded. As we thought, we were right. Not the biggest turn out for the bike show compared to the Saturday but there were still at least 10,000 people there. Getting the press passes which we had already sorted out was also fun...

Usually with bike shows you expect it to be all bikes, but not this one. The vast majority of it was bike clothing and accessories. Lots of clothes with some very good bargains to be had. There were stalls ranging from names you had never heard of, to the big names like Yamaha and Suzuki. The accessories for the bikes were amazing, racing exhausts (cans), LED lights to fit into your bike's fairings (the plastic or carbon fibre, if your lucky enough, panels that cover up the frame and engine) to make it shine and glow, wind deflectors in every colour you can think of. A modders heaven although of course not cheap!

Then we found ourself in the bike section. Suzuki GSX-R600/750, Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R/ZX-10R, Honda CBR-600RR Fireblade, the lot. All the bikes you have hanging from your wall as a kid. Mouth watering, jaw dropping, super fast bikes. Of course there were your typical bike models there showing off in their lycria suits, but not as many as you would think for a bike show. I got to see all of my favourite bikes, the only problem was they were all brand new. I have to admit I prefer some of the older models to some of the newer ones that they had on show.

Walking around the bikes, trying to pick my chin up off the floor, we walked into 'crazy town'. All your huge American tourers, crazy choppers, trikes and just your weird bikes, which you might like to look at but would never buy. On show in the Carole Nash section was a rather odd looking concept bike made from plastic and bits of metal. The nice attraction about that bike was the see-through fuel tank. You would have no excuse for running out of fuel but even better you would be able to see the flames rushing up the fuel lines into the tank before it blew up, giving you ample amount of time to jump off into a ditch. Definitely not a bike I would ever buy. We also stumbled across a massively over-whelming trike. The funniest bit was watching a guy kick what looked to be a fuel filter, thus allowing fuel to leak all over the lower half of the very shiny trike and the floor.

Having to pay for everything in the show was a bit of a downer, like £4 per person to ride in a simulator, where you are supposedly Valentino Rossi, but it turned out to be some American guy who beat him. The mini-motos and karts were an outrageous £10 for not a lot of time.

All in all though, it was a good day out. Not really recommended for a beginner to the biking world, like my other half or for people who are not really into bikes, but for peolpe like myself, two wheeled heaven!