Continental Cruisin'

Spotted last night outside Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh. 

A Royal Enfield Continental GT. 

And very nice it looked too in the evening sunshine. 

Slow Coach

This well travelled Ural 750 has turned up at a few events that I've been at over the years, but this is the first time that I've ever had the chance to speak to the owner.

Having made a number of small, but imprtant modifications to it over the years he reports being very happy with it. It's never let him down and the few problems that he has have all been pretty minor. 

He believes that it's reliability is down to how he rides it. It's not meant to be a fast bike, so he doesn't ride it very fast. 

55mph gets him most places he reckons and, as he's retired now he's rarely in much of a hurry anyway.

Trophy Sport 2014

I’ve been a bit busy this week so haven't posted anything on here about the trip to Cumbria that I mentioned last time.

It was a good weekend away, and the actual run down was made in brilliant sunshine and with barely a cloud in the sky. It was such a contrast to the abortive trip to Wales made on pretty much the same roads only a week before.

Once I arrived I met up with a lot of the old familiar faces. It's funny, but people that you only meet up with a few times a year become good friends over the years and it is always good to get together.

As is the norm these days people arrive on an assortment of machines, but these are probably the pick of the two-stoke MZs that did turn up. They are ETS250 Trophy Sports. Well worn, and definitely well used.  

Growing Up?

Last weekend I packed the bike and headed off for a rally in North Wales. Well, that was the plan.

The weather forecast had been a bit iffy, but Friday dawned bright and sunny with hardly a cloud in the sky and I decided to give the weathermen the benefit of the doubt.

About an hour into the trip it began to rain a bit, nothing too bad at first, just light drizzle. However, it was getting increasingly windy and the bike was moving about a fair bit on exposed sections. Once I got onto the motorway it went from bad to worse. Between the rain, the spray thrown up by other vehicles, and the wind it was getting a bit dangerous so I left the motorway around about Gretna with the intention of sticking to smaller more sheltered roads and seeing if the weather let up further south.

The Old Blacksmith Shop

I'd never been through Gretna until this point so felt the urge to stop and take a couple of photos at the Old Blacksmith Shop, famously the home of runaway weddings. This was one of the few times that the rain stopped on the trip. It was also incredibly busy for lunchtime on a Friday, something which you can't really see in the photos.

This is just plain weird. It looks like something you'd see in North Korea

From Gretna I took mostly A-roads, but it was stretching the trip out a fair bit and the weather didn’t look like improving. In fact, by the time I reached Kendal in Cumbria my Satnav was showing that I still had about five hours left to my destination. When I had set out three and a half hours earlier it had shown almost the same time. The rain was still a feature, as was the wind neither of which looked like abating so, reluctantly, I turned around and headed home.

When I was younger I'd just have pressed on, so maybe I'm getting a bit wiser as I get older, or maybe I've just turned into a 'fair-weather-biker'? Whichever it is, I wasn't having fun and I had no guarantee that it was going to get any better anytime soon.

There's another rally in Cumbria this coming weekend and we'll have to see what the weather serves up this time around. It is, after all, supposed to be the bloody summer!