First ride with Keis G601 Heated Touring Gloves

I bought these heated gloves last December on an impulse after reading a positive review in Adventure Bike Rider. I have worn them once for a very short ride after installing the wires through my jacket and today rode from Cambridge out to Eye in Suffolk and back – about 100 miles. The temperature varied between 7 and 9 degrees. It was dry with bright low winter sun and a little wind.

Here they are.

Keis gloves

First, let’s backtrack a little. Buying items like helmets and gloves, or clothing on line, i.e. without trying on different sizes and directly comparing how they feel is hazardous. I have wasted money on a helmet that when I got it could not decide whether it was too small. In the end I decided to keep it and wore it out and about. But an hour’s ride showed me that it was too painful to wear and it had to go – on ebay and at a significant loss because it was too late to return it. Wearing a helmet around the house is just not the same as actually wearing it for a couple of hours in the open air. I also bought these gloves, following the sizing guide on the website, trying them on, thinking yes these are a little tight but will probably stretch, lets keep them. Today I wore them on my first extended ride – 2 and a half hours – and set to their highest heat. The fingers were rather uncomfortable, especially over the knuckles causing me to try to hold on and operate the bike with straight fingers. By the end of the two hours I was feeling that they were rather hot in places and I could not quite manage to turn them down while riding along a motorway, though they are simple to move between the three levels of heat when stationary. But it wasn’t until I got back and took them off that I saw the red marks on my hands where the heating elements run.

An hour later I had this painful blister caused probably by a combination of too much heat i.e. a burn and the pressure.

When I wear them again, if I do, I will try wearing silk liner gloves underneath and keep the heat turned down. I wonder if this is another expensive mistake. In the meantime, I look forward to the Spring and temperatures in double figures.

New Touratech Luggage option for KTM790Adv

Even though the KTM catalogue from 2019 – its the last one that made it into my house – shows their middle-wieght adventure bike, the 790 Adventure, fitted out with black aluminium panniers, most riders seem to put soft, weight-saving luggage on the bike. The brand in vogue seems to have been Mosko Moto. You can fit a surprising amount of travel gear into their Reckless 80 litre bags.

I got drawn into that but always secretly wanted the convenience of some hard luggage, especially when going on a short ride or to do some shopping. And my Touratech aluminium luggage left over from my last BMW was still taking up room in my garage which is also full of a kitchen, old vacuum cleaners and furniture. And a topbox is a handy place to store your helmet while you are in the supermarket. I tried some nice strap-on tail pack from Kreiga, mounted to the Perun rack that I fitted soon after buying the bike a few years back. It was great for carrying some tools on a ride but not much else. Eventually I have caved in and started investigating fitting the mount for my Touratech top box onto my 790. You have to buy the whole set up to get the tubular mount. But Touratech in the UK could not tell me when the black version would come into stock so we agreed to try the kit made for the Husky 701 as they are very similar bikes. The cost was £150.

The kit arrived and on my first attempt to fit it I found that the Husky and the KTM have very slightly differently placed holes for the bolts that fit the rear rack. My second attempt involved fitting the tubular mount onto my Perun rack which was fiddly but possible. And it does not look too bad.

The top box would be much better if black but is fine. I don’t think the taste police will pull me over for it.

tt rack and Zega Pro from the back

Another Icknield Way ride

It started as a trip up to my garage to search for my lost angle grinder. Once I had realised that it was not to be found (how can I have lost it?) I decided to work on my newfound confidence and ride the short section of the Icknield Way again. Its a short and not bad ride out there from Cambridge, through Fulbourn and Balsham, so why not? This time I wanted to record it so took my GoPro mounted on my helmet and another camera pointing more or less at me. I arrived at Balsham and turned everything on then set off, past the ‘Unsuitable for Motors’ sign (assuming that this didn’t actually mean ‘motors are prohibited). Things started off well. The track is gravelly in most places, straight and pretty flat. A little way down things started to get muddy with the the huge and soft tyre marks left by a tractor. I had one moment of instability on the slippy mud and then managed a climb. Further on, the muddy tyre tracks covered the whole track – apart from about 18 inches on the side that I only noticed afterwards. Heading across them at about 18 mph the bike quickly went into a slide and I ended up in the hedge and on the floor for the second time in as many months.

Unlike my fall in Wales, this time I wasn’t hurt and got up feeling optimistic I could pick up the bike and get going again. But for some reason the side stand had come down and was jammed in the mud. With a great deal of heaving I moved the bike out of the hedge but could not lift it enough to get the sidestand up. It was completely stuck despite some digging around it with my Leatherman blade. I did too much pointless heaving and tugging and pretty soon felt a sharp pain where I had broken my rib two months earlier and could not believe how stupid I had been to do all this.

I looked up and down the lane but it was clear very few people came down here. I started thinking about walking to the nearest house, but to ask anyone to come out and help me seemed a bit unrealistic, especially if they did not like the idea of people riding motorcycles on this route. Eventually I remembered my Cambridge based bike-riding friend. I hesitate before asking people for help but I could see little option. Luckily there was enough signal to reach him and kindly he agreed to ride out and help me. I was hugely relieved but while waiting for him I did more useless heaving. I thought about the advice not to ride potentially tricky terrain on a bike like this alone.

He came, and methodically helped get the bike into a position where we could both lift it and rode it up to a place where the ground was dry, then rode with me back to the garage where I surveyed the not-too-much damage on the bike.

GPX trace

The GPX file even shows my meeting with the hedge (yellow) followed by some moving around (red)

What is the moral of this little story? Don’t be an idiot. Get a lighter bike if I want to ride even these ‘easy’ tracks alone (I was looking at reviews of a Yamaha Serrow on the way home…). Yes the adrenaline of the first moments after falling can help you lift a bike, but it is good to survey the situation carefully before putting in unfruitful and potentially injuring efforts. Having a few friends is much better than having none. Another thought – which I am adding a few days later after having looked at the Icknield Way official websites – is that I should check on which stretches of the Icknield Way motors are allowed and which they are not. There are plenty of Youtube videos of people riding adventure bikes on tracks around fields claiming that they are riding the Icknield Way but if I were out walking I would certainly not want to meet up with a large motorcycle travelling at some speed and possibly in a group on these often narrow paths.

Last night I went up to Cambridge and dropped by the garage. It is very bleak on a cold winter night (it was Halloween). I had never been there in the dark before. I also saw that everything was covered with mud.

Can you see my angle grinder?

The contents of the flask were very welcome on a cold foggy night

A brief taste of the Icknield Way

Today, on an unusually warm sunny day in September, I took the train up to Cambridge with the intention of exploring on my motorcycle some off road route near to the city. Its part of the Icknield Way an ancient walking route from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk that passes near Cambridge on its way to Suffolk and Norfolk. The part that I rode turned out to be quite a safe and easy gravel route, occasionally sloping up hill and very occasionally wet with muddy puddles. I can imagine that it would be not so easy to ride after wet weather. But it was a confidence booster. The last time I took my highly off road capable bike off the tarmac was in Portugal to try part of the ACT heading south from Braganza and that was a more tricky ride, with lots of turnoffs to avoid and all done in 35 degree heat. This reminded me of the Bardenas Reales in Spain which is a much easier and entertaining route. I need to do this more often.

Details
A brief taste of the Icknield Way

1975 and its contents

1975 was a formative year for me. It was, partly, the year between leaving school and starting university. I was 18 and 19 during it. For a few months, I can’t remember exactly how many, I worked as an assistant warden in a youth hostel in Dorset. I was attracted to the area by having read a number of Thomas Hardy novels and wrote to the YHA, for some reason, asking if they had jobs in that part of the country. These posts were unpaid but you got full board and lodging. In my case this meant sharing a room with the warden, and sleeping on a sofa. It was, how shall I put it, an eye-opening few months. The warden was, I would guess, in his 40s. Everybody looked old to a 19 year old. One of his ‘hobbies’ was riding a motorcycle and a number of his men friends would visit and they all also rode motorcycles. The most interesting visitor was Ted. Not Ted Simon but Ted (Edward) Goring. Ted lived in Bath, worked as a journalist there and rode a very snazzy new motorbike. It had electric start which the warden and his friends, who role British bikes that sometimes started after a frenzy of kicking, used to make fun of. It was a BMW and I am pretty sure it was a R90/s. Now that I am developing an interest in restoring a classic BMW, am am taking more notice of these old models. I even ran a search on the DVLA website to see if I could locate this bike. I knew the registration number because the photos taken at the time – of me sitting or standing next to it – clearly show it. It looks like it hasn’t been used for about 25 years.

I think Ted must have been its first owner and he must have visited us down in Dorset soon after buying it, to try it out and show it off perhaps. I remember, through a rather golden mist of nostalgia, the Sunday evening when he gave me a ride from Dorset to Bath for me to stay with him on my day off. It was that ride, stored in my memory, that influenced my decision to take the bike test and buy a motorcycle back in 2008.

I also remember that not many months afterwards, Ted had a bad accident. I believe that a mobile crane or some other large vehicle backed into him when he was stationery and he broke a leg. I have a memory that he discharged himself from an NHS hospital because he thought that they were not treating it properly and checked in at some private place. I also have a memory of visiting him in his Royal Crescent flat while he was struggling around, and very grumpy, on crutches. I don’t know what happened to the bike in that accident. Clearly it lived on for another 24 years at least. And perhaps it remains, gathering dust and mice, in some real or metaphorical barn waiting for me to track it down and restore and ride it.

I have often wondered what happened to Ted and finally I found an obituary. I have missed him by 4 years, sadly. Edward Goring’s obituary is here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/11/edward-goring-obituary

The text mentions his love of motorcycles which is nice. ‘He continued riding high-powered machines into his 70s’. In Bath he introduced me, fleetingly, to Jan Morris through the sunroof of her BMW.

At last the long-awaited camera arrives

While I was away in Wales I got ‘the phone-call’ from London Camera Exchange that my Fujifilm x100VI that I had ordered months ago had arrived and was ready to pick up. Here it is making a coy entry into the household.

Its the kind of camera that you wonder whether there are more pictures of it than taken with it.