In hindsight, of course, we should have gone by train to the NEC, but when your tickets include free parking, you don't really think of it! However, the NEC is about 3 hours each way from London, and it made for a very long day in the car.
We set off at about 10:15 am, stopping for petrol and buying sandwiches when we were at it, and arrived at about 13:30. We were able to catch a shuttle-bus up to the NEC itself, our car park being about 15 minutes' walk away. Once there, we made ourselves comfortable, and then spent a very happy 3 hours or so wandering around the five halls devoted to the exhibition.
We are not in the market for a new motorhome, but it was nice to look round the new Pilotes, deciding what was nicer than our one, and what was less so ("But where do they put their clothes?" we asked, of one model!). However, the joy of these occasions is the huge variety of stalls scattered along the sides of the halls, selling everything from accessories for a motor home or caravan (but we couldn't find a reversing camera, which is what we really wanted, and the only thing that might have been a stove-top oven, which I quite want (like this one, for instance) was eye-wateringly expensive. In the end, we didn't buy very much - a new power-bank which came with a free screen protector for the Swan Whisperer's phone, and some glasses-cleaner (what, has that got to do with camping, I wonder - something we wondered about many of the offerings!). We did, however, pick up quite a lot of brochures about France (which, one of the stall-holders told us, is pretty much completely under water right now - I hope we don't get too wet when we set off next week), and about television aerials/wi-fi boosters, as ours doesn't seem to work.
