General Bike Ravings

GC Mode! I love switching into GC Mode and letting the K’s roll off the rubber.

With the Grand Challenge (1,000 miles in 24 hours) looming at the end of October and me having done very little riding, today I decided to go for my first conditioning ride in order to harden up the butt and try to get the mind and body into the endurance groove. It was a last minute decision to do this, so it was to be a solo ride and to expedite matters, I just pulled an unused 1,000Km ride plan and ...

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So. Here I am on the other side of 40 with a learners licence and a bike in hand. Am I sick of the riding like I quickly did with driving a car? Not even close!

Matter of fact I'd wished I did this sooner. But such is life. I started a family early with my beautiful - and very tolerant - wife. As I did so, I watched my brother and my cousins riding along on their VF750 Sports, CB600s and CX500 customs with envy. 20 years down the line and they no longer ride. My family have ...

Yeah, fine, OK, so I’m dragging out the trip by one more blog. Look out for the book and souvenirs coming to a store near you. We’re gonna commercialise the hell of out of this. I can see the headlines now… “Harleys survive a trip with a BMW”.

Well, if you’re still reading my blogs, I’m impressed. By now you have read more than 98 pages of writing (I write the blogs in MS Word first), in excess of 64,500 words, and viewed more than 2,200 pictures. Originally, I wrote my blogs ...

The alarm rang at 7am, but I was actually already awake, waking with a start at 6.55am, thinking I might have slept in. I wanted to sleep however, so I snoozed the alarm twice. Fortunately, I didn’t sleep any more, getting up, having a remaining apple from a previous breakfast, for breakfast. I chucked all my gear into my combination of bags, as I needed to re-pack at the warehouse anyway.

I was down at the bike and ready to go by 8.15am and we left at 8.30am for the warehouse. ...

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The alarm rings at 7.30am. What was a good idea last night, to perhaps follow the group into LA is now a real bad idea. I reset the alarm for 8.30am. When it rings the 2nd time, I get up and have the complimentary breakfast in the office. It’s cereal, pastries, juice, the usual stuff.

Back to my room, I spend an hour and a half writing blogs. The extra effort is paying off, and I only have 2 days to write. I still need to post most of them however. I then pack, and taking advantage ...

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After another couple of quiet winter weeks, we broke the rides drought with a local poker run ride today. Don’s usual format for poker runs includes a bit of orienteering to find innocuous landmarks to obtain answers to trivia we should all know....if we’re drinkers of Tui!....which reminds me....did you know what Henry Wagstaff invented?

Anyway, last week, after a short Rodeo practice session with a half dozen riders, I needed a blowout so I nipped over the hill to visit me mum. ...

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The alarm was set to ring at 7.30am to have the bag at the van before 8pm. Dave was up and about, opening the curtains, turning up the TV and generally making plenty of noise shortly after 7am, so sleep was out of the question. I turned off the alarm and took the bag down to the van, where plenty of discussion was taking place. It was a strange morning… there was seafog and it was… uh… what’s the word again? Cold, that’s right.

The bags for the San Francisco ...

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The alarm rang at 6am as planned. I got up at 7am… that wasn’t the plan. Once again, I silenced the alarm instead of getting up. Oh well, headed to the main building for the complimentary breakfast, receiving comments of surprise at seeing me up (it’s not that unusual is it?) and some of the others were busy having breakfast.

I packed (yeah… watched some SVU at the same time) and gassed up on the way out of town. As usual, prepay was required, the attendant saying ...

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