| | Biker News - Regularly updated
Category: Random
-
Recreating the first around the world ride 100 years on
In northern California, we tilted east through the foothills of the Sierras, with Mount Shasta in the distance covered in snow even in June. Which is where it all started to go horribly wrong for Clancy and Allen. With the mountains looming, they stopped at the express office in Redding and shipped their 50lb panniers on to Portland, then bought cheap blankets in the General Merchandise store for camping. That sorted, they tanked up with more ice cream, fuel and oil, and set off late in the afternoon for the dreaded road that lay ahead. They didn’t have long to wait: within a few miles out of Redding, they were climbing an endless succession of rocky grades with hairpin bends, then sliding down the other side to be greeted by small but lethal lakes full of boulders.
Often the road got so steep that they had to dismount and run beside the machines, and as they were sliding down one hair-raising slope with their back wheels locked, they came upon a young couple in a Cadillac stuck fast on a tree stump.
They got it free, but the hill was so steep the fuel couldn’t make it up to the carburettor, but not to beaten, the resourceful Bob blew into the top of the fuel tank, his face slowly turning the colour of a beetroot, while the driver cranked the starter handle until the engine spluttered then fired into life and settled down into a steady rhythm. The grateful couple gave the riders six eggs, a small can of baked beans, an even smaller can of condensed cream, a little bread, sugar and coffee, and a pail to cook it in, and since by now it was growing dark and they were still in the heart of the mountains, they found a grassy spot near a crystal stream, and while Clancy cooked up a feast in the pail, Bob made a bed of weeds and leaves between the Hendersons, they wrapped themselves in their blankets and, with strange sounds from the woods all around and lightning crackling overhead, finally fell asleep just before the grey light of dawn woke them again.
At 5am, tired and hungry, they fired up the Hendersons and set off on roads which, impossibly, were even worse than the day before. A ferry carried them across the raging Pitt River, and halfway up the next mountain, Clancy’s Henderson ground to a halt with a dry and slipping clutch. He greased it with oil from his tank, but the clutch was so worn and the track so steep that he could only push the Henderson up it in the fierce sun, stopping when he was so exhausted he couldn’t hold the bike upright and resting until he could try again.
It took him 20 attempts and two exhausting hours to get up that one hill, and there were a dozen more beyond. “If ever a man was bitter against motorcycling, it was I and then,” he wept, but when he had the strength to lift his head, realised for the first time the extraordinary beauty around them. Compared to that, we had it easy as we swooped along silky tarmac through a landscape of pine-clad mountains and rushing rivers and across the state border into the alpine glories of Oregon, filled yet again with respect and admiration for Clancy and Allen getting through this landscape on what were basically mule trails.
Shortly after passing a prairie schooner with a prospector, his wife, small son and dog aboard, they encountered the worst section yet: the 12 miles of Cow Creek Canyon which Clancy described grimly as like an endless frozen pig pen as steep as a roof and littered with logs, rocks and ruts. Arriving in Roseburg as darkness fell, they collapsed into the first inn they could find, and emerged to find that someone had stolen Clancy’s gloves. The next day, the road was so bad, and the scenery so glorious, that as Clancy put it perfectly, a poet would have been in heaven, and a motorcyclist in hell. When they finally rolled into Portland at 11.30 at night, their misery was compounded by the sight of the crowds going home from the last night of the annual Rose Festival, which they had been looking forward to all the way from San Francisco.
Cow Creek Canyon, Clancy’s endless frozen pig pen, which we rode with local bike journalist Bart Madson, was now a perfect motorcycling road, twisting and turning under the dappled trees, over the railroad tracks and past a river sparkling in the sun. Greeted by the paved streets, electric lights and tuxedo-clad waiters of Wallace, Idaho, Clancy and Allen decided that the Wild West only existed any more in movies, only to have their certainty overturned the very next night when they arrived in Missoula, Montana, to find a posse in hot pursuit for a gang of desperadoes who had shot at their landlady, stolen the sheriff’s six-shooter and terrorised the town before heading for the hills. Wincing at the outrageous bill the next morning, they rode off into a thunderstorm so bad that by dark they had only covered 20 miles and were forced to spend the night in the shack of prospector Isam Cox, who rustled up a feast of bacon, beans and coffee for the exhausted but grateful duo.
In Wallace, we found the electric lights were still working and the streets still paved, but the brothel had closed in 1988 and was now in a museum. The girls had left in such a hurry that they’d left their clothes behind, and by the looks of it they didn’t have much to wear but a few skimpy under things, poor dears. "Greg, want to phone the hotel tonight and confirm our reservation?” said Richard as we put on our helmets. “No need. Dr G’s from the Crow tribe, and they’ve already got a reservation,” I said. Laugh? I thought they’d never start.
Follow the blogs
-
Cycle Law Scotland has started a petition to encourage the Scottish Government to: "Pass a bill for strict liability in collisions between motorists and cyclists and cyclists and pedestrians" and needs your help to get it off the ground.
Here's the link:
Here's why it's important:
The bill is designed to protect the most vulnerable road users and to reflect a hierarchy of road users. It would be applied in Civil Law cases for road traffic collisions between motorists and cyclists and similarly between cyclists and pedestrians. To that end, the campaign also sets out to highlight the dangers cyclists face from motorists and help facilitate a change in attitude amongst road users to one based on mutual respect and understanding.
We are only one of a very small number of countries (Romania, Cyprus, Malta and Ireland) across Europe, who do not operate such a system of strict liability for vulnerable road users and yet it is not unprecedented in UK law.
-
We put this down to the efforts of our members community sharing their views, thoughts, and ideas.
We have gained hundreds of new members recently because we believe the BBA is for real bikers who love motorcycling and is not for legislation drum banging bureaucrats.
WE DO NOT:
Publish printed articles full of adverts. Send you meaningless text messages. Charge £27.00 per year per member. Hold meetings about the meetings we had when we last met! WE DO:
Provide amazing value for money when compared to the BMF and MAG. Provide you with an android app full of resources for the avid motorcyclist. Give you up to date motorcycle news. Let members voice opinions, thoughts, and ideas through the website. Get you involved with campaigns that matter to us motorcyclists. Take a look at the fastest growing motorcycle association in the UK. Even if you don't join us you will find the BBA is a modern 21st century association for BRITISH BIKERS.
www.britishbikersassociation.org
-
Recreating the first around the world ride 100 years on...
At the border crossing between France and Spain at Le Perthus, Clancy ran into trouble. “A villainous Spaniard, bedecked in the most dressy of uniforms, blocked my entrance into sunny Spain,” he fumed in his diary that night.
This “veritable brigand” then charged him a whopping $55 customs deposit, or almost a month’s wages back home, in import duty, then had the audacity to demand a tip. Giving him six cents, Clancy set off into Spain, only to be slowed to 15 miles an hour by the dreadful roads. “To all those who are planning to motorcycle in Spain, let me give one word of advice – don’t!” he wrote grimly. Then, a broken crankshaft bearing forced him to spend the night in Figueras, where his complete lack of Spanish led to him being led to a hotel with half the town at his heels when he asked for a garage, and the waiter bringing him a bottle of wine in his hotel that night when he asked for the bill.
Today, Le Perthus is a long, steep street lined with shops, off-licences and tattoo parlours, its pavements hiving with shoppers carting crates of cheap booze back to France, the entire scene watched over by a disturbingly glamorous blonde policewoman. “I wonder how I could get myself arrested and strip-searched,” said Gary as we looked in wonder at a scene in which the only thing Clancy would have recognized is the ancient customs post at the bottom of the street. Leaving the Henderson in Figueras to be repaired, Clancy boarded a “wretched hencoop train” which took seven hours to get to Barcelona, during which he decided that he preferred the Spanish to the French both in looks and temperament and they were “even more gay than the Italians in nature”.
Ah, how the language changes. If we’d told any of the Spaniards we met that they were more gay than the Italians, a riot may well have ensued. Wandering around Barcelona the next day, Clancy felt refreshed by the constant laughter and play of children, and deeply impressed by the fact that the hard dirt streets were swept and sprinkled with water every night. Most enchanting of all, though, was the paseo, or evening walk, in which the citizens strolled hand in hand or arm in arm. He would be pleased to know that both the paseo and the sprinkling of streets are customs maintained to this day, and although the children he saw laughing have grown up and old and died, their grandchildren are laughing still.
He went to bed a happy man, then took the train back to Figueras to see how the repairs to his Henderson were coming on, only for an “exasperatingly slow mechanic and his two ornamental assistants” to take three days for the job, leaving him with only 24 hours to ride the 120 miles back to Barcelona port for the boat to Algiers. He set off at 5.30 on wretched roads which shook him to a pulp, and by the time darkness fell at nine, he had only covered 60 miles. The fact that he could not even see the holes and rocks in the road added to his misery, and after an hour in which he saw neither a living soul nor a house, he fell twice, the first time smashing his light and the second almost breaking his leg. He pressed on into the night, pushing the bike across countless fords and rivers, until his nerve was badly shaken when the shadows at the bottom of a steep descent suddenly turned out to be a raging torrent. “After a while I got so I didn’t care – philosophically reflecting that one must die sometime and to die with one’s boots on is very noble; so I rushed all the fords that came later, and surprised myself each time by reaching the other side alive. My dear old Henderson seemed to enjoy the excitement,” he wrote in his diary.
I wonder what he would made of the eight-lane motorway along which we sped at 80mph to Barcelona, since we had a hot date at the statue of Christopher Columbus in Mirador de Colom with Adelaide director Sam Geddis and his wife Gloria. It was an appropriate choice, not only because Columbus was an adventurer, but because we were being watched over by the ghost of Clancy, since he’d stayed in a two-room apartment overlooking this very spot.
In the previous Adelaide Adventure around Oz, Sam and Gloria had flown out to ride with us for the first three weeks, and this time around they’d planned to do the same, after Sam had gone to some trouble persuading his fellow directors that Adelaide should sponsor this to a degree which they were reluctant to do in the middle of a recession. Then, when Triumph, the original providers of bikes, had to pull out because of a black hole in the sponsorship funds which they couldn’t fill, it was Sam’s suggestion to go to Jim Hill at BMW Motorrad Mallusk, a good friend of BMW’s UK head of marketing, Tony Jakeman.
Although work commitments ended up scuppering his original plan of riding with us through Europe, he and Gloria had come out to join us for a day in Barcelona, and there they were at the Columbus statue, Gloria looking immaculate as ever, since on the Oz trip she’d managed, by my reckoning, to fit 4,386 changes of clothing into a single suitcase. “Geoff, great to see you. Fancy a Magnum?” she said. That’s right, I’d forgotten: one of the rituals in the baking heat of Oz was the daily stop for a Magnum, possibly the finest ice cream bar on the planet. “Gloria, are you mad?” I said. “I’ve seen enough ice in the past fortnight to last me a lifetime. Nonsense. It’s a lovely day,” she said, nipping off and returning with Magnums for all. After all the photos were done, I took Gary on a motorcycling tour of the sights of the city: the Sagrada Familia, Casa Batllo and Parc Guell. That night, we all met up again for a slap-up meal in Los Caracoles, an ancient restaurant in the old quarter, and after the usual argument, Sam ended up picking up the bill, as he does.
And so, fed and watered, we sped south through Italy, heading for Tunisia to see if we could blag our way into Algeria at the border.
Follow the blogs on www.adelaideadventures.com
-
Following his dismissal from a job he never should have had, Kevin Turner packs a tent, some snacks, and a suit, and sets out on a two-wheeled adventure across Europe.
With no idea where he's going, and only two very large and confusing maps to rely on, he heads out to prove that planning and forethought are the very antithesis of a motorcycle adventure.
Bonjour! Is This Italy? A Hapless Biker’s Guide to Europe, offers a unique and often hilarious insight into the challenges and excitement afforded by a lone motorcycle journey though Europe. In his quest to escape the frantic nature of London life, Kevin Turner heads south across France, crossing the Alps into Italy, and onto Rome, before returning via Germany - and the treacherous Nürburgring - in the hope of rendezvousing with the beautiful Nina.
Throughout, the author provides valuable advice to those considering a similar journey, noting the best and most scenic routes, where to stay, and what to see.
This is interspersed with a raft of comic anecdotes that demonstrate exactly what NOT to do when lost on a motorbike in Europe.
A must read for anyone who has ever toured on a bike, with many laugh-out-loud moments! (THE BIKER GUIDE)
For more information and contact details, please visit www.haplessbiker.com
|
