What, if any, is the link from Martin Heidegger to adventure motorcyclists’ heaven, the Touratech showroom and HQ? Its here:
travel
A lighter adventure motorcycle
Sometimes I think how good it would be to be riding a really light bike. The BMW Sertao caught my imagination when I borrowed it last year. How good a long-distance traveller would it be?
Here’s someone who smeared his in Araldite then rode it through a Touratech showroom. You’ve got to wonder how that little single cylinder engine copes with all this stuff.
My folded life begins here
After 6 weeks of waiting I finally collected my Brompton this evening from their slightly chaotic store in Covent Garden and I wobblingly cycled it home having left my full size bike obediently waiting at St. Pancras. Folding and unfolding this thing is daunting. I can’t believe how people do it in the blink of an eyelid. So I am keen to see how cycling up those steep north London hills feels on this little bike.
My folded life
After ten years of uneventful bicycling in London, I have recently had a wheel and now a saddle stolen from my old racing bike. The latter has proved terminal as part of the seat post went too leaving my incomplete post siezed in the frame (its been there for years) and the bike shop telling me what I knew already but which I had been ignoring that my frame is broken in another place. The bike is beyond repair so its time to salvage the parts that I can and look for a new bike. Given my nomadic life I’ve decided to bite the bullet and order a folding bike from here.
I pick it up in 4 weeks [unfortunately my new date for the build is the week starting 14th December – that’s disappointing] while they build exactly what I want at the factory in Brentford.
It should look like this:
He went out for a few months and came back 14 years later
BBC Radio have a series of short conversations that they call The Listening Project. The key is something powerful in a short conversation often between family members though sometimes friends. Loss and love are frequent themes. I noticed this one:
Itchy Feet – Ian and Judith
last week. Its a slightly strained conversation between what you’d have to call an elderly couple – from Yorkshire. The introduction is something like: he went off travelling on his Honda motorcycle for a four month trip and returned to his wife 14 years later (can it really be true?). Now he is planning his next trip. He’s 70. He talks about getting his visas for Russia and Mongolia, sounding like he is following in many overland motorcyclists’ wheel tracks. ‘I’m fit as a butcher’s dog’, he says, ‘when my hip gets mended’. ‘I’ll tell you, I’ve spent more time in a tent than t’Indians’.
The final journey home: Portsmouth to Cambridge via the ill-fated M25
Just for completeness, here are the last stages of the journey home, to be fleshed out later:
I slept poorly on the boat,
in fact I slept badly for the whole trip! Gathering down on the very lowest deck as the boat came in to Portsmouth was a nice opportunity to chat to the others with bikes.
They were a pleasantly friendly and interesting group which restored my positive feelings towards bikers. There were at least 4 other 1200gs bikes there including the new water cooled model which its owner was very pleased with though the electric suspension turfed him off the bike when his pillion got off for the first time, he said. We made it up the very steep ramp and then I sped out of the port and up onto the motorway and up the A3 to the M25 at a really good pace. The bike’s fuel gauge has not been its strongest feature and it is on its third one since I’ve owned it. Telling me I had 66 miles left, then 68 then 72 miles should have made me stop for petrol but I thought I could make the next stop apparently 25 miles away. But of course I ground to a halt by the exit to the M40 and had to be rescued and re-fuelled by the RAC – the first time I have called them out.
I also learnt that 40 minutes of leaving the ignition on to keep the hazard lights flashing drains the battery to a point where it needs an on-hand RAC person’s charger to get the engine going.
When riding in the rain in Spain, water leaked into the tiny hole in the GPS screen (caused by me dropping it a couple of years back). So the route only starts from after I filled up with petrol near Uxbridge and is inaccurate.
Coming home at EveryTrail
Eventually, after stopping for something to eat at South Mimms on the A1 – which seems more like a business meeting centre than a motorway service station, I got home by 4pm.
I have to say I was exhausted – and still am. But It was a successful trip and most of the lessons I learnt from my last trip to Sweden I was able to put in to practice.
