motorcycle

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Wales trip Day 2 Tenbury to Ludlow then Trawnsfynydd campsite

Breakfast in the Bridge Inn was in front of a huge HD television screen showing us the Olympics opening ceremony from Paris – eventually I saw they had left the remote around so I turned it down. Two other couples came down for breakfast, one an older man in a bright orange Hawaiian shirt with a younger female partner. The food had the same slightly unhealthy feel to it.

I got up to Ludlow by a surprising and pleasant back route to pay my visit to J who lives in what I think used to be called a warden-controlled flat in a block. The street is steep but I could pull in and park the bike next to the big metal gates into the carpark of her block. Jane came out but wasn’t able to open the gates with her fob so I had to manoeuvre the bike to one side, grateful that it is relatively light. I wondered if there was a fault or whether she had the wrong item. In the end someone else let me in and gain I needed to park the bike in a narrow space.

J told me that she is very happy where she is living. She asked me about my family, then again a few minutes later and then a third time. I had a gradual realisation of her mental state. We went for lunch in a cafe next door, a lovely place but we arrived an hour earlier than she had booked. Because of the noise for much of the time we each read separate sections of the newspaper which she went out to buy. With flashes of some of her earlier character, she asked me some sharp questions about a book that I had written. I shouldn’t accept passively that the publisher is rubbish at publicity, she said. After lunch we went back and chatted for a while in her flat. I asked her what her plans were for her memoire which she had sent me a few years back in order to discuss publication. She seemed utterly surprised that she had written such a thing and asked me to send her a copy. Age and chronology became a little disturbing for me. First, she informed me that she would be 84 at her next birthday, not 90 as I had thought she had told me. Then she told me that she had moved into this accommodation 16 years ago. I was shocked to do the sums that revealed that she moved there when she was the same age that I am now.

When I prepared to leave, it was clear that J couldn’t open the gate so again another resident came and opened it as she beckoned me to get through before it closed. And after a quick goodbye I was off, turning right up the hill toward the town centre.

Then the real holiday, perhaps, started with being on the bike, leaving Ludlow and heading north west towards the campsite I had booked in Trawnsfynydd. I found the time with J quite upsetting, partly to see her own mental decline from her days as a sharp-minded academic and secondly how her age and faculties might map onto my own. So the cool air and sunshine of my ride was good to clear my head a little.

Details

Tenbury to Ludlow and then to Trawnsfynydd

My camp was Camp Stesion. It is in the Snowdonia national park and has beautiful vistas that it took me quite a while to really notice and appreciate. Once I unpacked I headed off 20 minutes to a supermarket at Portmadog for provisions. The campsite has simple facilities with a nice style – shower rooms with corrugated steel walls, for example. It was quiet apart from a group – two young couples – that started playing heavy beats at 10pm, leading me to get out of my sleeping bag and go over to ask them to stop. They did but talked and laughed for most of the night. They had two large suitcases on wheels as their luggage.

Campsite in Transfynydd (approx) — Simple facilities that are just right

Wales trip – day 1 riding from Cambridge to Tenbury Wells Friday 26th July

First, here’s a map of the whole trip.

From my notes: To start the trip I needed to carry up a bag full of travel items on the train from home in London to the garage in Cambridge where I keep my motorcycle and where I’ve been keeping most of my camping equipment. So, on the first day of the trip, I rode from Cambridge to Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire. The ride itself isn’t much fun, starting on the super busy A14 out of Cambridge before becoming the M6 east of Birmingham and other motorways to the west. There were roadworks and many 50 mile an hour speed limits but I wasn’t overly concerned to be riding a little slowly. The total distance is a little under 150 miles. I forgot to mention that I had bought and fitted a Puig adjustable screen extender as I thought that it might make these long motorway miles more peaceful. I have to say that I didn’t notice any difference, in fact, if anything there was a little more turbulence. It looks odd on top of a rally style screen so I may remove it.

Details

Cambridge Garage to the Bridge Inn Tenbury Wells 148 miles

Tenbury is a small old market town and every address seems to be in Teme Street, the Teme being the name of the river that runs by the town, because there is just one street. I stayed in the Bridge Inn which is just by the river. There is a small beer garden just by it. The High Street, Teme Street, is very pretty with a few hostelries (the locals clearly don’t use the Bridge Inn much) and took about 5 or 6 minutes to walk to the end of and back. The Bridge Inn itself is pleasant, with a newly refurbished feel to the bar and the rooms. Staying in pubs could be noisy especially on a Friday night as this was, but on this occasion the place was extremely quiet. It was being run by two young and enthusiastic people, one of whom told me that he had only worked there for a week. I chose to eat dinner there and the pub’s speciality was burgers of various varieties. I chose one with pastrami – tasty but with a lack of vegetables or healthy ingredients. Not my usual diet but something in me, perhaps a kind of laziness, draws me toward highly processed food when travelling.

DMD T-865: shall I keep it or ditch it?

Having now taken the DMD tablet on two or three trips, I’ve made some progress with it but I find there are still some serious problems with using it that amount to deal breakers for me.

First the positives: I’ve worked out how to turn up the volume and assign a button to that so I have been able to hear the turn by turn instructions from Google Maps and DMD – when riding at slow speed at least.

I’ve worked out how to tether my iPhone to the DMD so now have a live connection that allows Google maps and Myrouteapp to work properly.

With stick on fingertips on my gloves the touchscreen works pretty well most of the time.

These are all major problems solved. But there are still some unsolved issues that make me consider deinstalling this outfit and putting it up for sale:

1 The screen is not very bright – nothing like the Garmin Zumo XT and I can’t understand why people say that it is. See the picture. DMD is set to 100% brightness. It is pretty much unusable when the light shines directly on it, in even dull sunlight.

2. The link to the iPhone keeps dropping out and is long-winded to reestablish involving two separate set up screens – certainly too involved to do safely while riding. And when there is a poor mobile signal, there is no GPS mapping – at least on the Google maps app.

3. The DMD app map seems to have centred itself in a large blue ocean somewhere and does not seem to auto centre on where I am. Again, this would take time to sort out – involving stopping.

4. When using it, the map does not seem to keep where you are updated.

The pros still are: I can just take one device on journeys that I can use as a Kindle, for internet browsing and blog updates

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