Lots More on the A84…

Categories: Diary Rides

I've mentioned before that I live next to one of THE great biking roads, the A84 from Callander to Killin. That's all of 20 miles of fast, wide sweeping bends that every so often turn into narrow, bumpy, twisty complexes that test machine set-up and rider anticipation, skill and basic sense. And far too bloody many people are failing that test: we've just had what (I think) is the third biking fatality of the year – and all of these on the mere eight miles between Callander and Strathyre, particularly through the twisties of the Falls of Leny, just North of Kilmahog and at the notorious "Doctor's Bend" a couple of miles further North.

The consequences of this aren't just limited to the motorcyclist and his or her (almost always 'his') family and friends but affect the local community: firstly, this is the only road South from here (without a 50-mile detour), so when it's closed for most of a day it has a real local impact. Secondly, and mostly importantly, people here are genuinely upset about the sheer bloody waste of life that's going – I haven't spoken to a single person who's anti-motorcycling in any way, but to many who are affected by the knowledge that another life has been needlessly lost on our doorstep and who genuinely feel the sense of lost humanity. While writing this blog entry, I've been approached by several friends and neighbours, each asking me if there's anything at all I can do to raise awareness of the specific risks of this road. So here it is.

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A821 Dukes Pass

Categories: Diary Rides

Today I should most definitely have been working – too much to do, too little time, yada yada... But by 11 o'clock the temperature was about 23° and not a cloud in the sky. I also tripped over my Arai on the way to make a coffee, which was an omen not to be ignored, so the concept of 'early lunch break' had its definition rather stretched. Besides, I wanted to test out a new toy – a little Sony GPS that records everywhere you've been – the downloaded results then being used to tag the photos you've taken along the way, before mapping them in Google Maps or Google Earth. And where should I go to test this but a second (and third) pass at a road I discovered last weekend – the A821 from Kilmahog (I kid you not) to Aberfoyle, via the Duke's pass. That's the Duke of Montrose, not the Duke of Bologna, which would have been so much more appropriate. This road is something else – it starts with a couple of fast sweepers that throw in a decreasing radius 120° corner at the last moment, then into a switchback straight which has self and machine airborne at anything over about 70mph – even with the new suspension. A large number of sump gouges and suspicious stains along this stretch tell their own tale. The road is a mixture of old and broken surface (with the occasional pothole and patch of loose gravel) and brand new shiny tarmac – overall, not too bad by Belgian standards, and less than brilliant by anyone else's.

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When You've Had Your Kicks On Route 66…

Categories: Diary Rides

…Then Get Some More On The A84

Been a bit quiet of late, haven't I? There's a reason for that and, I hope, a good one: self, partner, our businesses and the cats have all been busily uprooting ourselves from our past lives – in my case, twenty years in the hinterlands of Surrey and replanting ourselves in our new demesne, the Highlands of Scotland. We've been here for two weeks today, and I'm typing this whilst looking out over the local Loch as the low Winter sun glows off the hills opposite. Which isn't a bad way to start the day, and a distinct improvement on the absolutely solid rainfall of the last fortnight. And, if the viciously incompetent British Telecom ever starts keeping its broken promises to provide us with our landlines, things will be just perfect. The lack of photographs in current posting (since updated) are just a reflection of the very limited bandwidth I have here via my mobile.

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Scott of the West Midlands

Categories: Diary Rides

Warning: Gratuitous and rambling nostalgia ahead: In 1981 I was living and working in Warwick, in my first 'proper' job after graduating – my prior history as a ski bum didn't really count. Now Warwick is a very beautiful olde towne in the English Midlands, but it is some 330 miles from my semi-ancestral home of Edinburgh, which is where I was intending to be for Christmas. Now I could have done the sensible thing and taken the train from Birmingham, sitting (or at least standing) in a semi-comfortable fug of other people's colds, second-hand cigarette smoke and generalised flatulence. But somehow that didn't sufficiently appeal to the masochist in me. My newly acquired pride and joy at this time was my Honda 400/4 – a finely crafted jewel of a motorcycle and an utter paragon of reliability after my upbringing on (and off) old British iron. I guess there was a mindset here that said, "I'm on a wonderful piece of to-the-minute japanese engineering. I am therefore invulnerable to the vicissitudes of the world". Which in turn led me to think, "So I'll just leap onto my machine and ride to Edinburgh for Christmas".

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Surrey Traffic Calming, Another of the Many…

Categories: Rides

Here's another example of good intentions gone wrong through ill-considered design and lousy implementation ââ?¬â??Ã? the traffic calming in the Surrey village of Dockenfield. It's a pleasant place, but the one road through the village had, until recently, a national (60mph) speed limit. It's also a straight road, so it's been crying out for both a speed limit and some form of traffic restriction. And a couple of years ago, it got first one, and then the other. I've no problem with that – they're long overdue & ndash; but unfortunately, the speed calming measures that have been adopted are blatantly bloody dangerous for anyone on two wheels. Look at the picture & ndash; they've put into place an angled restriction, and then made it look even narrower by extending smooth raised kerbs further into the road. Now the idea of 'perceptual restriction' is fine and dandy, but here they've managed to create an arrangement that's going to be completely lethal to the first motorcyclist or cyclist who hits one of those kerbs in the wet at night. Not to mentioned the large metal manhole cover that covers the approach. Not only that, but the quality of the work is so poor that the surface is breaking up and the kerbs themselves have moved out of alignment. So let's add this one to the ever-lengthening list of Surrey's Bad Ideas Poorly Done.

Boiled, Peeled, and Thoroughly Mashed

Categories: Rides

(A Pillion’s View … of the 2005 WVAM France Trip and beyond)

“Pillion? That’s just sitting on the back and taking it easy, no?”

One of the first pieces of advice I was ever given about how to be a good pillion was ‘pretend you’re a sack of potatoes’. Well you can call me Maris Piper, because I’ve just completed a 1300 mile trip across five countries (and one duchy) - behind someone who, had I been less than chipper, would have been the first to give me a good roasting.

Having heard great things about the annual WVAM trip to France I had a feeling it would be a lot of fun, and it was! Not only did I have the chance to witness some really first rate riding skills and learn a lot about bikes, but I made a personal voyage of discovery (a cliché I know, but it’s actually true!) … and met a lot of new friends, too.

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State of the Art…

Categories: Bikes Diary Rants Reviews Rides Riding Tech

Bear with me, will you? I've been running this blog and site since late 1998 and have finally gotten around to migrating it all into my Two Worlds vServer engine, a set-up based on Movable Type content management system plus lots of other bits and pieces, held together with various hackettes (sorry, "ubiquity integration modules) in perl and php. Anyway, most of the raw content is across, but I'm still writing a few scripts to handle images and attachments, hence the sudden lack of photos, incriminating or otherwise. This will be completed very soon, at which point whatever passes for normal service will be resumed.

Richard

French Leave

Categories: Diary Rides

It's 6am on a Friday in June, and some sort of semi-conscious recollection tells me that this is D-Day for the annual club invasion of France and that I really should be heading for the nearest ferry terminal. After managing a state of denial about my increasingly frantic alarm, I finally give in to its electronic persistence and fall out of bed at 6:30. But by 7:20 I'm sitting on the loading ramp of the ferry in Portsmouth harbour.

Call me an antisocial git (form an orderly queue, please), but a 5am hack across 120miles of Southern England to reach the Chunnel with the main group is not my idea of wakeful fun. The fast SeaCat had been full (a P&O claim later denied by others) so I took the slow boat, arrived in Le Havre at 3pm and I was sitting in the bar in the Hotel Dauphin in L'Aigle by 4:30pm. Which was probably a mistake, as I was cheerfully beered-up by the time everyone else arrived and great concentration was required to maintain conversation. Which of course explained my headache the next day - too much concentration, clearly. As before, the Hotel Dauphin was welcoming, hospitable and thoroughly pleasant. Pity then that I wasn't there - along with the rest of the 'disreputable bachelor' contingent, I'd been booked into the only other nearby alternative, the Hotel Artus. L'Aigle is a small town and, it being national Musique week, everywhere was booked solid, so t'was Hobson's choice. And I have stayed in worse: a flophouse in The Congo being about all that springs readily to mind. One night there was quite enough, after which bribery, corruption, luck and pathetic whimperings found me a place in Le Dauphin.

First Aside: when does a habit become a tradition? In each of the last two years a certain member of the club has entirely failed to finish the French trip on the same motorcycle he started on. That looks like a habit. Now it might be pushing it to claim that two years of expiring Ducati, BMW-hurling and deer attack can be called a tradition. Three I'd suggest lays a good claim. So, while sitting contemplating the joys of Biere pression, I heard motorcycles approaching. Particularly, I heard the sound of a v-twin exhaust playing continuo to the rattle of a Ducati clutch. "Aha", thought I, "that'll be either Malcolm or John, then", just as a group of machines hove into view, led by Mr C's Ducati. I'd just got as far as thinking, "Coo, he's made it this ti...", when I saw the state of the fairing. So let's call it a tradition, shall we? Continue reading "French Leave"

Spring Upgrade

Categories: Rides Riding

After a moderately soggy winter and some blusterily soggy early April days, today dawned bright, clear and without a cloud to sully the sky. With clients vaguely under control, I'd a couple of hours to bunk off and enjoy the arrival of Spring. So I did just that and trundled at a leisurely pace through Haslemere and thence onwards towards Chichester, picking up the pace on a nice selection of twisties.

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Good Frideday

Categories: Diary Rides

My subconscious is obviously at work – it's half-past six on Good Friday morning and I'm wide awake. A low dawn sun throws soft luminous patterns across wall, floor, duvet and the severalsome infeasibly large cats who are occupying far more than their fair share of the bed.

The awakening mind prompts again – it's got a lot to deal with at the moment – some good, some bad and some merely paradoxical. But around and around it whirls all the same. The best medicine for this is the detachment of doing something – anything that requires total focus. This however from someone who, in the general course of things, is quite capable (to choose but two instances) of having malevolent door frames leap out and gratuitously bruise him or of losing the sunglasses that he's been wearing for the last two hours – without taking them off.

That focus comes though, when I change modes – when I'm skiing, reading compelling books or listening to truly great music. But above all, it comes when I'm on the edge, in that space where enjoyment and survival depend on the interplay between concentration, judgement and execution. And that, for me, is when I'm skiing the high mountains, extreme mountain biking or motorcycling for its own sake. As it's mid-April, and I'm in Southern England, let's say it's going to be a motorcycling day.

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Mild in the Country

Categories: Diary Rides

I am not tired. I went beyond tired about four hours ago, on the other side of the English Channel and 200 miles away. I am however home. My motorcycle is also home and is shiny-side up. Strictly, most of my motorcycle is home – the clutch went functionally AWOL somewhere mid-Normandy. That was interesting, and bloody ungrateful of it – I'd spent the weekend praising its 15,000 mile reliability to the skies – the one other Ducati on the trip having come home on a trailer.

So my hall now contains a strewn trail of oversuit, leathers, gloves, boots, rucksack and helmet, the trail leading directly to the wine cupboard. All bar the wine are steaming gently as the microclimate of a long, damp ride slowly clears itself. The cats have sensitive noses. They look appalled.

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