Palm Trees, baggy shorts and the end of summer

I’ve always maintained that Las Vegas is the best place to have the Interbike show in, seeing as it’s such an alien-feeling city, with its palm trees, blasted desert and bleached concrete, its neon and all-you-can-eat buffets. It’s as far from the normal world which most people going to the show live in, that it serves as a good reminder of why we love riding bikes in the first place. It makes returning to the cool, damp air of the UK a definite pleasure and hearing tyres grip over moorland loam makes a better sound over the endless gravel of Bootleg Canyon, Nevada.

The urgency to see everything new is amusing. Although we’ve seen most of the new products during the year, at events from the Sea Otter, through to official press launches and the Eurobike show, there are still enough new products on show to keep us busy, trying to track down the latest and greatest. Modern technology has given us digital cameras and the internet on which to pass on the information, but it also means that the demand for new product news now! can be large. The irony of course is that many of the products that people want to hear about tonight (and not tomorrow) won’t be out for six months. On the plus side though, at least I’m not still shooting slide film with a flashgun in a dark show hall – that used to be quite the lottery…

So, that’s the crazy show season almost done for the year – there’s still the NEC Cycle Show at the end of this month, but after that, it goes relatively quiet until Core Bike at the end of January. It lets us catch up with friends, family and bike riding for fun at weekends a little. Interbike always marks the start of autumn as it seems that in the short week or so that I’m away, the trees start turning. It’s already time to look forward to colder weather, riding in jackets and drying shoes by the fire.