Touring & The Bikes You Use

24/09/16

After much planning to produce ‘the half’, it was finally time to ride it. ‘The half’ being the ‘North Island 800’, an NZ Distance Riders offering to ride 800km in 12 hours, which is being run in conjunction with the North Island 1600 24 hour event, although for some reason, I’ve never heard that referred to as ‘the Full’.

The event isn’t scheduled until 08 October, but as one of the organisers, I had decided to ride it early to get the checkpoint photos for ...

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From: 19-20/03/16

Things have been pretty busy lately, both at work and on the biking front, doing prep work for this year’s Nth Island 1600 in October. My big job in that area right now has been fine-tuning a route, then preparing the Rider’s Guide, which was all but done except for the sample checkpoint photos, (although it did have streetview photos in there for now)… So a plan evolved.

I decided to have a big weekend away, riding both the NI1600 and the NI800 back ...

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Three years between rides is a bit of a stretch, and I might be a bit biased, but God damn it, I enjoyed the shit out of the North Island 1600!!

The last few blogs have outlined the prep' and the weekend before the big event had me in a bit of a panic to fix the stebel horn because I new BrianH was going to be scrutineering the bikes and if he can pick up, that the rear tyre on a Beemer has been fitted back to front, he was sure as hell going to pick up that my horn was neither squeeking ...

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I had the bike serviced last week and also now have a pair of Z8's waiting to fit. The Z8 on the front had about 9,000km on it with perhaps 2-3.000km left and the PR4 on the rear only has 3,000km on it. However Having decided to replace both prior to the North Island 1600, I needed to rack-up some km to chew out the front and wear as much as possible on the rear.

Having done 3 conditioning rides of 375, 740 & 490 km, I wanted to do at least one more of about 1,000km,....plus whatever ...

The fifth Capital 1,000Km Cruise is now done and dusted with 36 bikes starting and 36 finishing. (one with a hardy pillion).

The route was an easy choice this year as it was rumoured last year that the Gentle Annie (Taihape – Napier Road) was to be sealed, so I prepared a route (along with a reserve) then once I saw from Banditrider’s Blog in July that this had been completed, I was soon on Mapsource to sort the finer details, finally coming up with a wee doozy that took in our new ...

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The GC and Getting Home

The decent ride on Friday helped to get a good nights sleep and I was up by 0600 again, scrub-up, breakfast, then prep the gear and go over the fuel stops again. We were surprised how dead it seemed at the Turangi Cabins as usually, the place is littered with bikes and there are heaps of people about, tinkering and chewing the fat, but this year it was very quiet and it turned out, there were only 67 starters for the main event. We had been pre-warned a month ...

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Getting There and The Extension

Being the 25th GC (Grand Challenge – 1,000miles in 24 hours), the anniversary event was marked with a 900Km extension on the Friday, to make the event up to a 2,500Km Long Weekend. As soon as the event was promoted I registered my interest and must have got in pretty quick as I was surprised a couple of months ago, when I got my registration pack in the mail, to see that I was #1. Also, as per the 20th GC, a video was being made of this event.
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....................DAY 2.

Nooooooo! The alarm went off at 0530 and dragged me from my coma! Up up and away, I got dressed, packed the luggage panier, extracting the day’s supply of bananas and water for the top-box, checked the tyres – 42psi on the button, exchanged the summer gloves for winter ones out of the wets and fuel panier, tidied the topbox, snacked, had a nice hot cup of tea….and we were gone at 0630.

I thought it was bloody winter as scooted ...