6 wheels and 1500cc round Europe.
Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 2:34 pm
Right then, here's a quick (or as quick as I can make it) round up of our adventures over the last two weeks. Somewhere at home I have the mileages for each day and of course the photos, but they'll have to wait:
Stats:
People - Me, my wife (S), and her brother (M).
Bikes - 1993 ZXR400, 1997 GPZ500S, 2001 R6.
Distance - 2303 miles on the GPZ's second trip counter. 2700 miles on the others.
Day 1 (Weds): Nottingham to Calais-ish
Luggage the bikes up and stuff the last few things into the panniers. Head out of Notts to find the Northbound M1 is closed - we're going south but means there's massive queues up to the junctions. While fighting our way through these (with difficulty, the GPZ in particular being about 5ft wide with fully expanded panniers on) we discover that the fan on the GPZ has packed in and it overheats in traffic. Woohoo. Motorway all the way down south. Starts pissing it down at about leicester and doesn't stop again till we leave the UK. Coming up to Dartford the GPZ starts sounding like a tractor - that'll be the exhaust blowing then.
Meet up with M on the M20, think 'F*ck it lets at least get to france' and go through the tunnel. Ride a few miles down the coast from Calais and book in for two nights to give ourselves a chance to sort the GPZ out.
Day 2 (Thurs): Calais-ish
Turns out the reason the fan doesn't work is that the actual rotor has broken - the blades/rim are no longer attached to the hub. Bizarre. Oh and the exhaust is blowing where it joins the head, but the studs/nuts are rusted too much to even contemplate tightening them up. Go to the supermarket for a tin of "le Gun Gum" and construct a 1/2" thick cocoon around the join. It lasts surprisingly well for the rest of the trip. More rain.
Day 3 (Fri): Calais to Bullingen (Belgium, just short of the German border)
Hit the E40 across Belgium. Boring, but gets us as far as Liege. Come off the motorway and head for Spa - turns out it's the qualifying/practise day for the "25 heures Fun Cup de Spa" - an endurance race with a field of what seems like a couple of hundred VW beetles. Amazingly, we are able to ride/wander right into the circuit and sit in the grandstand on the s/f straight opposite the pits. Ace. We make the executive decision to can the idea of going to the Sachsenring MotoGP in favour of going to Baden-Baden and chilling out in the Baths - numb arses from the E40 may have contributed to this decision.
We try and get into Germany but can't find it (insert 'barn door', 'five paces' and 'couldn't hit' comments here) because we're using back roads that aren't on our map so we stay in a campsite down a narrow rough track in the middle of the forest on the Belgian side of the border. I speak French and German to the Proprietor, he replies in French and Flemish.
Day 4 (Sat): Bullingen to Baden Baden via the Nurburgring
Finally find the border and pick up the B258 to Nurburg. Spend some time around the car park resisting the urge to do a lap (intermittent rain and 4 days into a 2 week trip = save it for another time) and chatting to Brit bikers. Lunch where the B257 goes under the track at Hocheichen. Get back on the B258 down to the Autobahn then have a series of top speed runs down to Baden-Baden. Ride around till I remember how to get to the campsite we stayed at three years ago.
Day 5 (Sun): Baden-Baden
Laze around the baths for a few hours till thoroughly wrinkly and chilled out. Laze around the campsite for the rest of the day.
Day 6 (Mon): Baden Baden to Munich
M plots out awesome cross country trip on twisty roads - everything from fast sweepers to tight hairpins. I deposit some knee slider on several of the latter, despite the luggage. The sun stays out all day. Couldn't be much better. We do the last 50 miles into Munich along the Autobahn, then get lost again trying to find a campsite we've stayed at before. Eventually give in and stop at petrol station to buy a map. Turns out we are only a mile or two away.
Day 7 (Tue): Munich
Spend the day walking round the Deutsches Museum. If you are at all of an engineering/science type nature it's worth going to Munich just for that. They say you need to walk 13km to see everything in there. It's the second time we've been and I doubt it will be the last. In the evening we go and drink big beers in the Hofbrauhaus.
Day 8 (Weds): Munich to Lindau
Jump on the Autobahn again to take us to Garmisch-Partenkirchen before getting on the twisties, crossing briefly into Austria then back into Germany to end up on the shores of the Bodensee.
Day 9 (Thurs): Lindau to somewhere near Interlaken (Switzerland)
Rain, rain and more rain. From packing up in Lindau, the short transit across the corner of Austria, and half way across Switzerland on the Autobahns it doesn't let up for a minute. We miss a junction and get sucked into Zurich, then spend about an hour trying to escape the stupid one way system. When we give up and find a campsite, S drops the GPZ at a standstill in the car park. The right hand pannier makes a surprisingly good crash bung, but it still snaps the front brake lever and the right hand hero blob. We camp on the worlds biggest slug colony - the slimy buggers are climbing up the outside of the inner tent all night, presumably to escape the monsoon.
Day 10 (Fri): Interlaken to Bourg-en-Bresse (France).
When it's still raining in the morning we make the collective decision that Switzerland is toad and we were going to France. We'd come to ride some of the Alpine passes, and this was clearly going to be a stupid idea when the cloudbase was considerably lower than any of them.
I swap the brake levers between the GPZ and the ZXR, on the grounds I can comfortably two-finger brake the ZXR while the GPZ is a haul-them-on-as-hard-as-you-can effort. While repacking we find that one of our Aluminium camping plates is now an amusing shape where it had been in the pannier that the bike landed on. We decide that is S's plate for the remainder of the trip.
As it's still damp, we hit the motorways again. It gets progressively brighter the further west we go so we decide to take to the twisties to cross the border. It turns out that the best thing about Switzerland is the road out of it - absolutely mind blowing, I could have ridden up and down it all day. By the time we get to Bourg-en-Bresse and camp up it's baking hot.
Day 11 (Sat): Bourg-en-Bresse
While everything is drying out, we decide we're going to spend the afternoon in the water park/leisure centre next door to the campsite. Turns out to be harder than it would seem as M and I only have boardshorts with us and you are only allowed trunks. Quick (and sweaty in the midday sun) ride to the nearest Decathlon has us kitted out. We spend the afternoon swimming, lazing by the pool, going on the waterslides, and playing "tits or butt"[1].
[1] a fun game for all the family which can be played anywhere with one of those straight, multilane waterslides that ends in a shallow (3") splash to slow you down at the bottom. Young lady in string bikini launches herself head first down said slide. What will she expose when she hits the splash at the end? Place your bets! (Oh and before I get told off for being a dirty perv, it was actually S that invented the game on a previous holiday).
Day 12 (Sun): Bourg-en-Bresse to Chaumont
Day of disaster. It starts pretty well heading North on the Routes National. We decide to make a sideways step along a twisty looking road before picking up the next RN and resuming our northerly direction. Turns out to be a brilliant road, but when we get to the end there is a diversion for Dijon bound traffic which takes us...right back the way we just came. At least it wasn't a sh*t road that we had to ride twice.
We decide to make up some time with a quick diversion up the Autoroute before resuming the plan at Chaumont. Shortly later, I accelerate off a roundabout and when I look in my mirrors there is no sign of the others. I pull in, and they don't come up behind. I double back and find them on the exit of the roundabout. Turns out the split link on the GPZ's chain has decided to do more splitting than linking (insert smug comments about "I'd never use a split link on a chain" here - I've got a rivet link at home, but it's one of the many things I didn't get round to before leaving). Fortunately, it's done nothing more severe than drop the chain on the road.
We roll the bike down the road to a truckstop/cafe where we can chain it up, then shuttle S and her luggage down the road to the nearest campsite (ZXR400 with tankbag, tailpack, and two sets of panniers is quite a funny sight). During this process I have to bumpstart the ZXR as I'd left it with the lights on and the indicators flashing while we were sorting out the GPZ.
Day 13 (Mon): Chaumont to Saarbrucken and back.
The campsite proprietor gives us directions to a bike shop that doesn't open on mondays. Our breakdown service tells us they won't be able to find a bike shop that is open on a monday. The guy on a GSXR1000 that I talk to in the town tells us that all french bike shops are closed on monday. The guys in the (open) car parts shop tell us that all the bikes shops are closed. We curse the french for a bunch of lazy buggers, then because we have nothing better to do, we ride the other two bikes to Germany, which turns out to be 200 miles, rather than the 150 I measured on the map. Sure enough 3 miles over the border we find a bike shop that is open and return the same 200 miles with a new split link, refit the chain, and recover the GPZ triumphantly back to the campsite.
Day 14 (Tue): Chaumont to Nottingham
We'd planned to wake up today somewhere near calais. Instead due to the GPZ chain incident we are 300 miles away, with another 200+ miles to look forward to on the other side. At least our expedition to Germany means we hit the road at 07:45, rather than the 10am bike shop opening time plus the time to recover the bike and load it up with luggage. The rest of the day is governed only by the ZXR's tank range and a vague adherence to motorway speed limits. Amazingly we make our scheduled tunnel train, where we meet two kiwi couples who have spent the last 6 months putting 28000km on a pair of crazy futuristic looking Victory tourers. The GPZ leaves a trail of boiling coolant through the tollbooths at the Dartford tunnel before we pull a final non-stop stint from South Mimms services to Nottingham.
Summary:
- Motorcycle touring is ace. We're already speculating on where to go next year.
- You can do it on a 400cc sportsbike, or a 500cc parallel twin commuter. Screw the BMW crowd. They can't get their knees down on the hairpins when they get to the Alps.
- However using a bike that you bought for £900 two and a half years ago and have been running into the ground ever since with no preparation for the journey is asking for drama.
- The ZXR on the other hand which I was worried about did the distance with no problems (apart from the one bump start).
- Switzerland in the rain is not a nice place to be.
- The french are a bunch of lazy buggers. Generally very nice lazy buggers, but lazy buggers nevertheless.
- You can do 900 miles in two days if you have to. But it's not much fun.
I'll get some pictures up in the next couple of days, and maybe add the distances/route map in later.
Stats:
People - Me, my wife (S), and her brother (M).
Bikes - 1993 ZXR400, 1997 GPZ500S, 2001 R6.
Distance - 2303 miles on the GPZ's second trip counter. 2700 miles on the others.
Day 1 (Weds): Nottingham to Calais-ish
Luggage the bikes up and stuff the last few things into the panniers. Head out of Notts to find the Northbound M1 is closed - we're going south but means there's massive queues up to the junctions. While fighting our way through these (with difficulty, the GPZ in particular being about 5ft wide with fully expanded panniers on) we discover that the fan on the GPZ has packed in and it overheats in traffic. Woohoo. Motorway all the way down south. Starts pissing it down at about leicester and doesn't stop again till we leave the UK. Coming up to Dartford the GPZ starts sounding like a tractor - that'll be the exhaust blowing then.
Meet up with M on the M20, think 'F*ck it lets at least get to france' and go through the tunnel. Ride a few miles down the coast from Calais and book in for two nights to give ourselves a chance to sort the GPZ out.
Day 2 (Thurs): Calais-ish
Turns out the reason the fan doesn't work is that the actual rotor has broken - the blades/rim are no longer attached to the hub. Bizarre. Oh and the exhaust is blowing where it joins the head, but the studs/nuts are rusted too much to even contemplate tightening them up. Go to the supermarket for a tin of "le Gun Gum" and construct a 1/2" thick cocoon around the join. It lasts surprisingly well for the rest of the trip. More rain.
Day 3 (Fri): Calais to Bullingen (Belgium, just short of the German border)
Hit the E40 across Belgium. Boring, but gets us as far as Liege. Come off the motorway and head for Spa - turns out it's the qualifying/practise day for the "25 heures Fun Cup de Spa" - an endurance race with a field of what seems like a couple of hundred VW beetles. Amazingly, we are able to ride/wander right into the circuit and sit in the grandstand on the s/f straight opposite the pits. Ace. We make the executive decision to can the idea of going to the Sachsenring MotoGP in favour of going to Baden-Baden and chilling out in the Baths - numb arses from the E40 may have contributed to this decision.
We try and get into Germany but can't find it (insert 'barn door', 'five paces' and 'couldn't hit' comments here) because we're using back roads that aren't on our map so we stay in a campsite down a narrow rough track in the middle of the forest on the Belgian side of the border. I speak French and German to the Proprietor, he replies in French and Flemish.
Day 4 (Sat): Bullingen to Baden Baden via the Nurburgring
Finally find the border and pick up the B258 to Nurburg. Spend some time around the car park resisting the urge to do a lap (intermittent rain and 4 days into a 2 week trip = save it for another time) and chatting to Brit bikers. Lunch where the B257 goes under the track at Hocheichen. Get back on the B258 down to the Autobahn then have a series of top speed runs down to Baden-Baden. Ride around till I remember how to get to the campsite we stayed at three years ago.
Day 5 (Sun): Baden-Baden
Laze around the baths for a few hours till thoroughly wrinkly and chilled out. Laze around the campsite for the rest of the day.
Day 6 (Mon): Baden Baden to Munich
M plots out awesome cross country trip on twisty roads - everything from fast sweepers to tight hairpins. I deposit some knee slider on several of the latter, despite the luggage. The sun stays out all day. Couldn't be much better. We do the last 50 miles into Munich along the Autobahn, then get lost again trying to find a campsite we've stayed at before. Eventually give in and stop at petrol station to buy a map. Turns out we are only a mile or two away.
Day 7 (Tue): Munich
Spend the day walking round the Deutsches Museum. If you are at all of an engineering/science type nature it's worth going to Munich just for that. They say you need to walk 13km to see everything in there. It's the second time we've been and I doubt it will be the last. In the evening we go and drink big beers in the Hofbrauhaus.
Day 8 (Weds): Munich to Lindau
Jump on the Autobahn again to take us to Garmisch-Partenkirchen before getting on the twisties, crossing briefly into Austria then back into Germany to end up on the shores of the Bodensee.
Day 9 (Thurs): Lindau to somewhere near Interlaken (Switzerland)
Rain, rain and more rain. From packing up in Lindau, the short transit across the corner of Austria, and half way across Switzerland on the Autobahns it doesn't let up for a minute. We miss a junction and get sucked into Zurich, then spend about an hour trying to escape the stupid one way system. When we give up and find a campsite, S drops the GPZ at a standstill in the car park. The right hand pannier makes a surprisingly good crash bung, but it still snaps the front brake lever and the right hand hero blob. We camp on the worlds biggest slug colony - the slimy buggers are climbing up the outside of the inner tent all night, presumably to escape the monsoon.
Day 10 (Fri): Interlaken to Bourg-en-Bresse (France).
When it's still raining in the morning we make the collective decision that Switzerland is toad and we were going to France. We'd come to ride some of the Alpine passes, and this was clearly going to be a stupid idea when the cloudbase was considerably lower than any of them.
I swap the brake levers between the GPZ and the ZXR, on the grounds I can comfortably two-finger brake the ZXR while the GPZ is a haul-them-on-as-hard-as-you-can effort. While repacking we find that one of our Aluminium camping plates is now an amusing shape where it had been in the pannier that the bike landed on. We decide that is S's plate for the remainder of the trip.
As it's still damp, we hit the motorways again. It gets progressively brighter the further west we go so we decide to take to the twisties to cross the border. It turns out that the best thing about Switzerland is the road out of it - absolutely mind blowing, I could have ridden up and down it all day. By the time we get to Bourg-en-Bresse and camp up it's baking hot.
Day 11 (Sat): Bourg-en-Bresse
While everything is drying out, we decide we're going to spend the afternoon in the water park/leisure centre next door to the campsite. Turns out to be harder than it would seem as M and I only have boardshorts with us and you are only allowed trunks. Quick (and sweaty in the midday sun) ride to the nearest Decathlon has us kitted out. We spend the afternoon swimming, lazing by the pool, going on the waterslides, and playing "tits or butt"[1].
[1] a fun game for all the family which can be played anywhere with one of those straight, multilane waterslides that ends in a shallow (3") splash to slow you down at the bottom. Young lady in string bikini launches herself head first down said slide. What will she expose when she hits the splash at the end? Place your bets! (Oh and before I get told off for being a dirty perv, it was actually S that invented the game on a previous holiday).
Day 12 (Sun): Bourg-en-Bresse to Chaumont
Day of disaster. It starts pretty well heading North on the Routes National. We decide to make a sideways step along a twisty looking road before picking up the next RN and resuming our northerly direction. Turns out to be a brilliant road, but when we get to the end there is a diversion for Dijon bound traffic which takes us...right back the way we just came. At least it wasn't a sh*t road that we had to ride twice.
We decide to make up some time with a quick diversion up the Autoroute before resuming the plan at Chaumont. Shortly later, I accelerate off a roundabout and when I look in my mirrors there is no sign of the others. I pull in, and they don't come up behind. I double back and find them on the exit of the roundabout. Turns out the split link on the GPZ's chain has decided to do more splitting than linking (insert smug comments about "I'd never use a split link on a chain" here - I've got a rivet link at home, but it's one of the many things I didn't get round to before leaving). Fortunately, it's done nothing more severe than drop the chain on the road.
We roll the bike down the road to a truckstop/cafe where we can chain it up, then shuttle S and her luggage down the road to the nearest campsite (ZXR400 with tankbag, tailpack, and two sets of panniers is quite a funny sight). During this process I have to bumpstart the ZXR as I'd left it with the lights on and the indicators flashing while we were sorting out the GPZ.
Day 13 (Mon): Chaumont to Saarbrucken and back.
The campsite proprietor gives us directions to a bike shop that doesn't open on mondays. Our breakdown service tells us they won't be able to find a bike shop that is open on a monday. The guy on a GSXR1000 that I talk to in the town tells us that all french bike shops are closed on monday. The guys in the (open) car parts shop tell us that all the bikes shops are closed. We curse the french for a bunch of lazy buggers, then because we have nothing better to do, we ride the other two bikes to Germany, which turns out to be 200 miles, rather than the 150 I measured on the map. Sure enough 3 miles over the border we find a bike shop that is open and return the same 200 miles with a new split link, refit the chain, and recover the GPZ triumphantly back to the campsite.
Day 14 (Tue): Chaumont to Nottingham
We'd planned to wake up today somewhere near calais. Instead due to the GPZ chain incident we are 300 miles away, with another 200+ miles to look forward to on the other side. At least our expedition to Germany means we hit the road at 07:45, rather than the 10am bike shop opening time plus the time to recover the bike and load it up with luggage. The rest of the day is governed only by the ZXR's tank range and a vague adherence to motorway speed limits. Amazingly we make our scheduled tunnel train, where we meet two kiwi couples who have spent the last 6 months putting 28000km on a pair of crazy futuristic looking Victory tourers. The GPZ leaves a trail of boiling coolant through the tollbooths at the Dartford tunnel before we pull a final non-stop stint from South Mimms services to Nottingham.
Summary:
- Motorcycle touring is ace. We're already speculating on where to go next year.
- You can do it on a 400cc sportsbike, or a 500cc parallel twin commuter. Screw the BMW crowd. They can't get their knees down on the hairpins when they get to the Alps.
- However using a bike that you bought for £900 two and a half years ago and have been running into the ground ever since with no preparation for the journey is asking for drama.
- The ZXR on the other hand which I was worried about did the distance with no problems (apart from the one bump start).
- Switzerland in the rain is not a nice place to be.
- The french are a bunch of lazy buggers. Generally very nice lazy buggers, but lazy buggers nevertheless.
- You can do 900 miles in two days if you have to. But it's not much fun.
I'll get some pictures up in the next couple of days, and maybe add the distances/route map in later.
looking forward to seeing the pictures!