Overland Expo 2015 – Guest Post From Mark Carrara

This year’s Overland Expo broke its seven year run of great weather.  Snow, sleet and rain in various combinations greeted Friday’s participants.  Rain and some snow continued to drench the Morman Lake site on Saturday, leaving the parking, camping and exhibition areas awash in a sea of mud.  Sunday’s sunshine and gentle winds did much to dry out everything ending another successful Overland Expo.

Overland Expo is more than just a bunch of companies displaying a bunch of great products. It is also a training opportunity.  Attendees with a day pass attend classes on topics as varied as rope splicing and camp cooking, round table discussions on many subjects, and trip slide shows.  Those who purchased the full Overland Expo Experience chose for over one hundred classes taught by 70 plus instructors from around the world.

Soggy or not, the display area contained companies large and small.  From husband and wife startups less than a month old, to Chrysler-Jeep and everything in between.  The scale of the products varied as much as the companies.  Companies like Earth Roamer showed off their mammoth expedition vehicles, AEV presented their modified Jeeps and Dodge trucks.  Tent manufacturers from Australia, South Africa and the US competed for campers with trailer manufactures.  Just about anything you want, need or dream of for overlanding or camping  was on display.

Unevenness marked the training.  Top notch, focused and on topic mixed withs scatter shot, rambling courses.  Hindered by the less than ideal environment in the theater, slide shows suffered.  The weather played havoc with hands on demos.  Except for a short time on Friday morning, the driving skills training, sponsored by Land Rover was canceled because of mud.

As the Overland Expo participants scatter to the four corners of the globe and the 2015 edition fades into history, what can be said of it?  The weather may have made life a bit more difficult, changed some classes and dampened some people, but spirits remained high and the show remained one of the must see events of the year.