The Outdoors Show

Its been a few days since I went to the Outdoors Show last Saturday at the NEC in Birmingham. It was an early start (4am), set off at 5am with my dad. We got there at about 8:15 and joined the queue waiting for the doors to the show to be opened. When the doors eventually opened at 9. There was a mad rush by everyone to the back of the hall with people running to get tickets to see Ray Mears. Me and my dad just walked quite fast and ended up with some tickets but there was a massive queue and would of been quite funny for onlookers seeing a mad dash of people.

Ray Mears was on at 10, so we just joined the next queue to get in the theatre and eventually got some seats. Ray came on about 5 minutes late because the organisers were waiting for the stragglers. The talk was different to what people were expecting I think, it was less about survival and more about the people he had met in different parts of the world, I found it fascinating. We thought it would only last about 30-40 minutes because Leo Holding was on at 11 but Ray went on for more than an hour and you could tell he cut the end short because everyone could sense the organisers were getting quite tense with running over. They also cut the questions and answers short.

After that we wandered around the show but to be honest I was a bit dissapointed, a lot of the things I was interested in weren't there (lightweight gear). The one stand I was quite interested in was Alpkit, I finally got to see the pipedream sleeping bag which I've been wanting but has been out of stock on their website for ages.

The Rab stand was tiny. I wanted to see the Generator, which appears to be out of stock everywhere until July. There was a lot of Tourist Boards there and we skimmed very quickly through some areas because my dad clearly wasn't interested. There are some things I would of liked to spend more time looking at but nevermind.

We went into the Go Fishing show which was also on, but that took about an hour and I thought there wasn't much there.