The Trip Out
With the show calendar finally starting to look a little healthier as 2021 rolls to a close, Blue Miller brings you an event which is new to OBM.
Now, this is something a little different for Old Bike Mart and you may be wondering why we have a chopper event in the magazine. But The Trip Out is itself a little different and has far more in common with the classic world than you might first imagine. After a few different sites, this year it was held at Euston Park, home of the Duke of Grafton (who did indeed pop in on Saturday afternoon to see what it was all about and seemed to have a thoroughly good time).
The Trip Out celebrated its 10th anniversary this year with the announcement that it could be the last one. Over that decade it has been a breath of fresh air, bringing new elements to an old formula and, above all, a homage to the chopper motorcycle. But don’t think that this is a gathering of fancy, high end modern machinery. The Trip Out has never been about CNC machining (although there might be a small amount of that) or expensive billet parts. Rather, it harks back to the days of the 1960s and '70s when people would take a perfectly good motorcycle and attach ridiculous forks and a sissy bar that made it impossible to wheel it into the average shed. It’s a reflection of an era in time and one that many of the people present were too young to appreciate at the time.
There were, however, a few folk at The Trip Out who remember those glory days of radically modified motorcycles. My friend Mick Howard has, since The Trip
Out started, been the guardian of the show field, ensuring that only motorcycles in keeping with the ethos of the event get to park in the hallowed arena, and it’s a job for which he is well qualified. Mick has owned his Harley-Davidson Shovelhead for 43 years; over that time it has been through a number of guises and carried him and his wife, Rita, for thousands of miles.
It’s now had its latest makeover and has gained a wheel but still looks smashing!
Meanwhile, many of you will know Odgie who has been part of the UK custom scene since there was a UK custom scene and whose boundless enthusiasm for two wheels manages to seamlessly take in every element of motorcycling, whether it’s racing completely inappropriate bikes, hurling his BSA around a dirt track or competing in pre-65 trials. He had brought along The Zenster, a machine with a JAP 600cc engine originally fitted to a cultivator and which, when he built it, received just as much attention and admiration from the classic world as it did from the custom industry. In fact, the build was serialised in Real Classic magazine. But also on display was his latest creation – whisper it low! An electric motorcycle… Now, I know e-bikes are a thorny issue and one that can start an argument in a heartbeat, but this really was one of the best-looking electric bikes I have seen and, because it’s Odgie, it has been designed and engineered on a budget that’s less than the big electric bike companies spend on coffee in a day. He built this latest bike for a couple of reasons; firstly, because he could and he loves a challenge and secondly, because he really enjoys off-road riding and what’s the biggest complaint about off-road bikes? Noise.
I have been to every Trip Out and one thing that I find really heartening about this event is the number of young people riding classic motorcycles (for ‘young’ I mean under 50 which, after all, is the new young!). They’re not riding them because they are a fashion statement but because they enjoy and love these machines just as much as any one of us. Take, for example, Alex Backhouse. Alex is a young lady who comes from a motorcycling family and her parents and brothers are Trip Out regulars, but she didn’t ride herself. Then she inherited her grandfather’s AJS and it just seemed wrong to her to have the bike simply as an ornament. So she learned to ride during lockdown, took her test and had ridden the AJS down from her home in West Yorkshire to Suffolk. What’s more, she’d persuaded her boyfriend, Callum, to learn to ride too and he now has a BSA. The huge smile on her face when she showed me the bike was a joy to see.
Getting youngsters on to motorcycles these days is difficult enough, and for them to own and ride classic bikes is an extra challenge. But these are the people who will keep the classic scene alive for decades to come and if an event like The Trip Out can encourage that, then we at OBM think that’s a rather marvellous thing.