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| Fireside MotoGP evening photo with yours truly courtesy of Jules Cisek aka PopMonkey |
The evening was set for Friday March 16, at the rather huge and plush Dainese D-Store in San Francisco. That day, storms decided to hit the Central Coast and the Bay Area with a vengeance. As my wife Emily and I set off from our little village of Capitola we had resigned ourselves to an evening that might be a little more intimate in terms of attendance than a crowd...by the time we inched our way through the traffic that always backs up for the Bay Bridge, we arrived at the store around 6.20pm. Kick off was 6.30. After running back and forth with computer bags, my Hawaiian shirt, plus the artwork, prints and my Marco Simoncelli 58 of #58 books I brought for people to look at and possibly purchase we had arrived...
Well, shut the front door! If there wasn't a huge crowd of people there (it was mentioned to me that possibly as many people as there were in attendance for the visits by Marco Simoncelli and Jorge Lorenzo! Totally humbled!) Shelli, the lovely manager of the store, mentioned that she thought that due to the weather that there wouldn't be the number of people that were actually there, and as it turned out they didn't have enough seating for everyone. A rough guess put the numbers around 40 plus. Which just goes to show what a hardy bunch we NorCal motorcycle racing fans are...no rain is gonna put a damper in an evening of MotoGP (and of course beer kindly supplied by Peroni as well as some tasty pizza). What was evening more humbling was people kept on arriving...and no-one got bored and left --- phew!! After a brief karaoke moment whilst I figured out the microphone, and with some minor hiccups involving my laptop and the syncing of the slideshow we went around the world with yours truly accompanied by some travel images, and a handful of my favourite shots from all fourteen MotoGP races I covered in 2011.
The whole "show" last a little over two hours. With some good humour thrown in along with many great questions being asked it made the weather irrelevant! Hopefully the answers were as good as the questions! Shelli deemed the whole evening a success, and I too was thrilled by the response and of course the turnout, especially for such a dour evening. Meeting up with likeminded people all fans of motorcycle racing and photography, and many of whom are good friends and as a result making new friends during the evening was extremely special. Being accompanied by my wonderful wife Emily made it moreso....
I think we'll be doing something similar later this year. So make sure to "like" the Dainese D-Store Facebook page as well as my Andrew Wheeler - AutoMotoPhoto FaceBook page for updates that will be posted throughout the upcoming MotoGP 2012 season.
Thanks again to all who attended. It was a special evening for me and I hope for all of you.
