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!