Annual Show 2011

28/05/11: Our sixth All Ireland Italian gathering. This year we moved to a new venue. Lisburn Island centre. As always with moving to a new location, you have the worry if its going to be as good as the last place and this was no exception as Cultra was going to be a hard act to follow.

Cyril and myself went to the Centre the Thursday before to get an idea of were everything would be going. We were met with the Island Admin who was brilliant and more or less gave us the run of the place for the day.

The chef in the Cafe of the Centre even got on board and said he would have Italian food in the Cafe for the the days event. Jonny and Simon had previously arranged the banners and there were posters all over the place. A lot of effort went into organising things.

But of course the one thing we couldn’t organise was the weather. It had rained with high winds all week and on the day it rained on and off. Was this going to be a wash out I wondered at the start of the day.

Tim was ready to greet everyone on arrival and was doing his best to stop his clipboard from getting wet, I think Herbies cover for his car helped a little here.
Jonny and Paul weren’t going to be outdone with the weather though. They turned up with a huge gazeebo, a generator and a TV, yes a 30″TV, they weren’t for missing qualifying for the Monaco GP. “Brilliant”.

And I needn’t have worried. Despite the weather over 60 cars and 10 bikes came out in support. The weather did clear up in the afternoon but I know that all of us in the NIIMC would like to thank everyone for coming along when you so easily could have just looked out the window and decided better to leave the car/bike at home. For our first event at Lisburn and with the weather, we can be very proud of how things went. We had a lot of the guys from further south come along as always supporting us and every one of them thought the Island centre was ideal and not to far for them to go.

So thank you to everyone who helped to make the day special and congratulations to David laird on winning car of the day with his original Abarth 131.