Friday 7 May 2010

St Tropez H-D Euro Festival, Day 1 (Thursday)

We didn’t have enough time to ride down through France, so having made the decision to fly and risk getting delayed by the Icelandic volcano ash cloud, we were happy to arrive in St Tropez on Thursday afternoon on time. I collected my red bike from the company that transported my bike – this was the same people that moved all of the Harley demonstrator bikes here – I arranged with them that they would bring my bike too.

















I took a quick ride and had a coffee in the port of St Tropez, where most of the bikers hang out. There was just time for a few photos and then dinner.

I will post more tomorrow after I have visited the main festival site and the custom bike show.

The pictures are from the port area – some bikes, a nice boat and just for bobscoot – bike parking the French way!


















7 comments:

Chris said...

Good luck with the show!

Unknown said...

Gary:

thank you for thinking about me. That is a narrow laneway, probably too narrow to park a car anyway.

Nice photo of your yacht, BTW.

Hope you win something. Have a good time and take lots of photos

I was thinking that you should have used this mini-vacation as a test run. Pack all the clothes you need into a small back pack . . .

bob
Wet Coast Scootin

Gary France said...

Chris – I decided not to put my bike in the custom show this year. It did very well in the show a couple of years ago, so I thought it best not to enter it again. But thanks anyway!

Bob – you would be amazed at where people park their scooters in St Tropez, for they are just about everywhere. It is clearly a very popular form of transport there. No, sadly not my yacht. I did use the trip to try some of the things out that I will be using on the main USA tour and the only thing that really didn’t work was the netbook I bought for the tour. It was fine for photos, blogging, e-mail etc, but a total disaster when it can to making videos, as it just isn’t powerful enough. I am going to need to rethink this and search for a more powerful version of a netbook. It was a silly mistake buying the one that I did – I just bought what I thought looked right instead of researching them!

Chris said...

Gary,
Look for a netbook with an ion processor or the nvidia video acceleration.

This will do 1080p video no problem:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002P3KMVC/ref=ord_cart_shr?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER

This has an HD accelerator and should be able to edit video:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003FZC1K4/ref=ord_cart_shr

BTW: I'd avoid premier on a netbook other than the first. It's a slow app in general. If you have windows 7 try the free live movie maker. It's quite basic, but works for 90% of what I need. It also runs on slower hardware.

Gary France said...

Thanks Chris, that sounds like just the sort of advice I need. I am torn however between having a laptop like the first one you mention which gives me all of the features I need and a smaller netbook that has the benefit of being exactly that - smaller. In addition, I am one of those people that once I get used to a particular type of software I tend to stick with it. Premiere Elements is now firmly in that category - I have got used to it, it can produce the results I need and so I would be reluctant to change it.

I guess I need to do some more research and comparisons....

Chris said...

Gary, if you're stuck on premier, I'd get the first laptop. It will work. Not sure on the second as premier uses more resources to edit than needed to play. good luck with the search. I'm excited to meet you this summer.

Gary France said...

Chris - thanks again. I am going to think hard about this and see if I can get a laptop instead of a netbook into my luggage somehow. I am looking for to meeting you as well. Cheers!