After a harrowing couple of days, I'm pleased to say that the site is now more locally hosted. We had around six years of good service from Doteasy (good call, Simon!), but with the site growing all the time, and with their supplied PHP and MySQL implementations getting a bit old, it was time to look elsewhere.
We're now hosted by Hosting365 , who are an Irish company. They're local, so that should make things faster, and we've also got over twice the storage space, so keep the event photos coming..
Everything appears to be up and running so far, but if you spot a problem, please email me.
It has come to the club's attention that our traditional meeting place is being used by other 4x4 drivers as a playground and, as a result, the picnic area has been ploughed up. We have also been told that rogue drivers have been driving in the river. In order to disassociate ourselves from this behaviour we have decided never to use this area as a meeting place again. Our new meeting place is now going to be the concrete bridge further along the river and this can be accessed by driving straight past the houses after the red sign (where we normally turn left for the iron bridge).
I would like to state, for the record, that CLRI does not permit any of the club members to drive on the grassed picnic area at the iron bridge and does not allow driving in the river.
It has come to the club's attention that non-club drivers have been accessing the forest so we wish to state, for the record, that CLRI only access the forest on organised club events, usually on the last Sunday of the Month with possibly one recce, always on a weekend, during the month. We will therefore only be using the forest a maximum of four times between now and Christmas and any forest visits will be published, in advance, on this web-site.
Any other vehicluar access to the forest is not CLRI activity and can be considered unauthorised, subject to the appropriate actions being taken by Coillte.
Due to the unstinting efforts made by club members the 4x4 Jamboree was made a success. David Goodman led from the front and this year had a deputy in Tom Maxwell. Because we only recieved confirmation that Fairyhouse was available three weeks before the event we found we were starting on the back foot regarding advertising and preparation. Dave had been working hard behind the scenes to make sure that all the necessary requirements for the securing of Fairyhouse had been met. He was also playing a major role in the managing of the various aspects of planning the event from manning the phones to being on the ground at Fairyhouse at the various meetings at the racecourse during the weeks leading up to the big day.
Tom Maxwell also carried out trojan work during the planning of the event helping to secure the various traders and planning the traders area. Tom also came up with the overall event plan and was on the ground managing the various work teams when the fencing was being erected. Andrew Harton planned the public course but was unable to see his design executed due to family committments.
From the club meeting on Wednesday night right through to Sunday evening we had a dedicated crew working tirelessly on the event and it would be fair to say that everyone pulled together this year to make it happen. The event simply would not have been feasible had it not been for the major amount of work put in by individual club members. They gave of their own time at no expense to the club. To get more details of who did what please visit the Jamboree thread inside the forum.
The weather held up for us but, due to a lot of competing events around the city, numbers were down and we did not achieve the turnover we were expecting. The event should break even when the accounts are finalised.
The Jamboree itself was a major success and the people that did come, both to watch and drive, had a great time and really enjoyed themselves. Ireland Extreme pulled out the stops to provide both a fantastic static display and rides around the public course. Our Hillbilly friends from Limerick helped to make the extreme course an enjoyable spectacle and the ex-military Willys Jeeps provided a fantastic display of vintage off-road driving.
All in all it was a great day and we are looking forward to the next one already.
