Autumn Journey

At the end of this month, a younger cousin of mine is getting married. The wedding and reception are going to be in the Newcastle area, and of course I will be there. The wedding and reception are in the same hotel, so I have booked in for the night before and the night after as well. I don't see my family often, so there will be plenty of catching-up to do, and I foresee some alcoholic consumption as well.

So, how to get there? Well, the obvious answer is the car. Warm, dry, comfortable, Radio 4 when I got bored, and plenty of CDs for when The Archers or a 'radio drama' comes on, plenty of room for luggage, hook over the back door for the suit. Satnav, hands-free phone, drink and snax on the passenger seat.

And boring.

So I'm going on the bike. It's a long time since I did a long journey at this time of year on two wheels. I ride year-round, but from October to March it's generally only commuting and errands, with the occasional fun run. This will be 340 miles each way of mixed A-roads and some of the busiest motorways in the UK. On a Friday. And with less then ten hours of daylight to play with. It will be cold, although not midwinter cold, and the possibility of rain is quite high.

On the positive side, I have got all the kit to keep me warm and dry ("Up to a point, Lord Copper") and the bike is easily capable of the journey. I have two decent-sized hard cases to carry all my stuff, and an Ortlieb dry-bag if I can't get my suit in the cases. I can rig up a power lead to run the satnav (useful for route-finding at the far end, plus planning fuel stops and so on) and the Ride Logger iPhone app. I can't mount the TomTom like I did on the Pan, as the Bonnie has no fairing, but it can live in the tankbag and I will consult it when stationary.

And the hotel has dedicated motorcycle parking. In fact, when I read that on their website, it's what made me decide to go on the bike in the first place. It would seem rude not to.

I am also planning to call in on an elderly relative in Richmond that I haven't seen for a long time, and on one of the legs, depending on time, I plan to take the pretty route across the Yorkshire Dales and the Forest of Bowland. That's a landscape that I don't see enough of.



I'm looking forward to it. If your life doesn't bring you much adventure sometimes, you have to make your own.

The Elan Valley Run

Today was not the hot, sunny memory-of-childhood-summers we have been experiencing lately, but it was a good day for a run nevertheless. The forecast was for showers, but in the event there was no rain - until I started putting the bike away afterwards - and the skies were overcast but with occasional bursts of warm sunshine. Roads were dry all the way.

I met my friends from the local TOMCC in Carmarthen and we rode together to Llandovery, where we had a cup of tea in the West End Café. We were six - Simon with friend Annie on his Sprint 1050, Joe on a Bonneville SE, Jo on her Thruxton and husband Martin on his Honda VFR. And me.

Then we set off on the run proper, up to Llyn Brianne and then over the mountain tops to Beulah and down into Newbridge-on-Wye. This road is a spectacular piece of single-track-with-passing-places, and includes the infamous Devil's Staircase, a 1-in-4 descent round some awesome hairpins.

We stopped to refresh the bikes' tanks in Doldowlod, and then had lunch in the Lamb and Flag in Rhayader. We left Rhayader and rode up the Elan Valley past all the reservoirs and onto the top of the mountains. The roads round there are stunning. I was here a few years ago with Anna, when we spent a long weekend at a campsite nearby and toured the valley and the lakes in the car. I remember at the time thinking what a fantastic area it was for biking, and wishing I wasn't car-bound. Well, today I was on two wheels, and the air was fresh and the bends were great.

We took the mountain road towards Aberystwyth and stopped for tea and buns at the Hafod Hotel in Devil's Bridge.



Bikes outside the Hafod Hotel, Devil's Bridge.

At this point we decided to split up - some wanted to go back to Carmarthen via Llandovery, while Simon fancied a run down the coast road. As I live furthest West of any of the group, it made sense for me to join Simon and Annie, so we said our goodbyes to the others and rode into Aberystwyth and then turned South to run down the coast. It's a road I know well, and even though I was on a bike with half the power of the Sprint (62 bhp to his 123) I managed to keep up through some aggressive overtaking strategies. I would have been even quicker in my full-face helmet (seriously), but the open-face was starting to lift off my head at any speed over 70 and my eyes were watering from the turbulence, so I had to restrict the fast stuff to very short bursts.

We parted at Cardigan with a wave, and I motored back to Haverfordwest along the coast to Fishguard and then down the A40. By now, it was getting cold, so I kept the speeds down and arrived home about 6 pm. I filled up near home, and the bike was returning a remarkable 58 mpg.

I had read about an iPhone app developed by Motor Cycle News called 'Ride Logger' in Oscar India's excellent blog, and yesterday I downloaded it to my phone. Today was the first chance to have a play with it, and it really is good. It uses the GPS function in the phone to log your ride, together with clock times, and calculates acceleration and deceleration data, as well as top speeds, averages and journey times. It has just occurred to me that there is now sufficient evidence in my phone for a successful prosecution - the maximum speed achieved is logged, together with the time and place it was recorded. I think that is all the courts would require. If any policemen or women are reading this, I'VE DELETED IT, OK?

Two downsides to the app that I have found so far: one is that it eats your phone battery. I started today with a fresh charge, and the phone lasted about 6 hours before it was warning me of a low battery. I plugged the phone into the socket I was running the satnav from, but I still had a low charge when I got home, so perhaps it wasn't charging properly. The second is perhaps the fault of the phone: when I was trying to have a look at the ride data, the app kept freezing up and would only work if it was shut down and relaunched. I'll work on this one.

Here's the group I was with:



Annie, Simon, Jo, Joe and Martin.

And here's one with your humble author, just for the sake of completeness.



Richard's anti-hi-viz strategy.