Touring & The Bikes You Use

Another year has rolled by and another Muscular Dystrophy ride (my 4th) has been done, but this year Ann joined me. Of the 14 bikes, 5 carrying pillions, only 3 hadn't been before so most knew what a great weekend we were in for when we met at the Brown Owl shops for a departure at 0900 hours on Friday.

This year Ann and I decided to dress for the occasion as Santa's Mr & Mrs Pix-E (the official photographer for the trip) and we had my mum whisk up a couple of capes. I'd checked the ...

I have just completed my third Grand Challenge (GC or 1000miles in 24hours) and this was to be my first ‘normal’ one because my first was the 20th anniversary of the event, so it had a bit more hype with a film crew videotaping the whole affair and my second was the 21st anniversary so that had a 500Km extension added to mark the occasion with 2100Kms. So, hopes of doing ‘Just Another GC’ were put to rest this weekend as I believe, there is no such beast!

I registered early in the ...

Wow!! What a great day....Great People, Great Roads and Great Weather.....especially considering that after monitoring the forecasts last week, we were tempted to pull-the-plug at one stage as this wasn't a ride one would want to do on wet roads.

We had 19 confirmed and registered riders who represented most sectors of the local biking fraternity....that's 3 ST riders and others.... I guess to be fair though, apart from the 3 Grumpy Old Men (Ulyssians) on their comfortable trucks, ...

On Saturday I went for a ride with some friends of my wife's, the first time I've been riding with more than two others. It was quite neat to see a string of ten bikes in front of me all going around the corners one by one. Great weather too.
We went out to the east coast of Chiba which has a decent beach, which is not crowded, yay! Our friends were camping there but we decided to come back that evening since we needed to do a bit of shopping ...

Well the weather was just too good to pass up, So we set off 9am from Nth Shore to Papakura to fill up, Down SH1 and left onto SH2, roads were dry and reasonably heavy with cagers and bikes. Headed to Paeroa and on through the Karangahake Gorge to Waihi where there was a market day with some added attractions, the hotrod/vintaqe boys had some nice looking cars and bikes on display, some interesting machines. On to katikati and lunch for Lo & I. After a break we tagged on to a couple of Trumpy's ...

I shined up the VFR the other day to take some photos of it. After fussing around posing it and getting the sunlight direction right etc, lavishing all this attention on it, I noticed my other bike peeping into the corner of one of the photos. Well now, I thought, ...

It's been several months since I saw my Moko', not to mention my daughter and son living in Rotorua. Nanny Ann and I had planned to go up for the weekend recently but it didn't happen, so with a free weekend, no ride for the past few weeks, the Rusty Nut Grand Challenge (GC) coming up in a couple of months and a lack of night riding in recent times, I thought it would be a good ride to leave early in the morning (about 2:00am), ride up, spend the day with them and ride back about 4'ish.
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The weather forecast had been for solid rain from Friday, but it turned out to be really fine. However now this week is forecast for solid rain from Friday again. I suspect this is because my new bike got delayed for a week, so the rain moved forward to this Friday to piss me off...
Anyhow we made the most of the weather on the Sunday, and went for a trip right to the southern-most point of Chiba, ...