This Saturday I headed again to the coast but again didn’t make it. The A10 north from Cambridge ends up in Kings Lynn and on the way skirts around Ely and other old towns. It can be frustrating with sometimes slow moving agriculture and few places to pass but has its nice moments. So far so good but on reaching the large roundabout outside Kings Lynn the penny dropped that on a sunny bank holiday everyone would be heading for the coast. So the road up to Heacham and Snettisham was jammed with cars pulling caravans. Giving that up as a bad idea I scooped myself up onto the road toward Wisbech, not that I would want to spend a Saturday afternoon there, but the road was empty though completely full in the other direction. Via a river event in scenic Upwell and some beautiful fen roads, in a strong fen wind, I made it back to sunny Cambridge. Next time I need a slightly better plan.

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Another Saturday ride out from Cambridge took me to Beccles, well very nearly to Beccles. I was aiming for the coast, again, but time and the body set a slightly closer destination. This is such a good model-a train ride from round the corner Liverpool Street up to Cambridge and then so soon on the bike I find myself in beautiful countryside. On the map I found an interesting corner of the Norfolk coast just up from Great Yarmouth and set my sights there. I took some of my favourite roads, through the Swaffhams, Mildenhall then the A11 briefly, the A1066 to oddly named Diss and the A 143. None of them would get awards but all of them fun, and relaxing to ride certainly compared to the London roads, with opportunities for overtaking. The weather was cool – around 15 degrees and often overcast but dry-ish. After two years of owning my BMW Nav V GPS I finally worked out how to tell it to show me the information that I want to see – all on one screen: my speed, the temperature, the fuel range and what direction I am pointing in. Amazing. I wonder what else I am missing out on.

Near Beccles, hunger, impending rain and other bodily requirements saw me parking up, next to an impressive array of other bikes at Macdonalds Beccles where I was revived by a cup of tea (milk delivered from four tubular sachets, and chicken nuggets ‘do you want four, eight or twenty?’ and other facilities and a few words with other leather-clad rain-defying bikers. Looking just now at the track on Adze, I see I was barely a hundred yards from the interesting sounding Our Lady of Perpetual Succour Church in Gillingham (I wasn’t in Beccles at all). How sad I didn’t keep going for a minute or two longer to investigate this church. There is even somewhere to part there – though they probably don’t serve tea.

On the way back I enjoyed some spirited riding on the A 143 and a loop of getting lost in Bury St. Edmunds. Avoiding the A14. Life’s simple pleasures.
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Building work in SE1 has meant moving out and taking Belinda back to a mystery location in Cambridge where she will rub shoulders with piles of furniture and artwork for the next 6 months or so. It feels so familiar to take the train up there from Liverpool Street, make my way to my old garage, and climb into armoured leathers and head off, usually in an easterly direction. It is really more pleasant to spend an hour in a train before riding than inching forward for the same amount of time through the traffic of south London before sniffing any sign of good roads to ride on. Today’s trip, taken on bank holiday Saturday with a cool sun shining, was back to Dunwich, a favourite destination partly because of the lovely ride from Cambridge especially on the A1120 but also the spacious destination where you can park for free, walk on the stoney beach and feel the sun on the face and take tea and cake at the great Dunwich Tea Rooms. The place is never crowded. Once I had relaxed and the stressful week had melted away from my body, I remembered the pleasure of riding a motorbike: the tilting of the body, the feeling of oneness with the bike, the acceleration, the cool air, the comfortable posture.

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At last: riding in the countryside in the warm sunshine on a day off work. March 15th was 6000 mile service day. I’d delayed it from the unseasonal November date. It seems much more appropriate to start the riding year with new oil and the other tweaks that a service provides. But the day was a day of two parts.
Up at 6 and on the bike by ten to seven, the GPS took me over Blackfriars bridge, up through Highbury and Archway and Barnet on the A1000, the old Great North Road, nearly all the way to Lind Motorrad in Welwyn Garden City. There seems no escape from London traffic and much of it was at a crawl until after Barnet. Its 28 miles from home to the dealer and the average speed was just under 16mph. Added to that the mist fell with poor visibility making full concentration necessary.

Since I was last there, SBW Motorrad has been taken over by the owner of Lind BMW in Norwich but the staff are the same and the showroom is more or less the same (where did that comfortable sofa go?) Waiting for the couple of hours that a service takes sees a motley crew of customers pass through, picking up bits, delivering bikes, looking at the shiny new ones, chewing the motorcycling cud. Some are reassuringly old, or well-spoken. Nowadays your bike gets washed for free after a service which is always welcome. Getting back on at 10am, the day was transformed and the sun was shining. The temperature had risen from 6 degrees earlier to 17. Partly for reasons of nostalgia I decided to ride up to Cambridge and enjoy the day off and the beginning of Spring. It was such a relief to be riding properly again. The A10 from Hertford to Cambridge would probably not make it into any collection of biking roads but it is always enjoyable with its empty dual carriage ways followed by some swooping A road that is rarely crowded – at least when I ride it. And straight after a service always feels like a good time to see if the bike goes any faster.

After a low-brow lunch in Costa, I made a return by means of the M11, occasionally busy but with nice open stretches, 60 miles back home but with inevitable delays on Mile End Road where a bus had broken down, then over London Bridge and home. There must be an easier route for those last few miles.

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