MooN

linky no worky

it's that legenday BMW reliability. That or the ginger jinx. Hey, maybe I just figured out why Pete changes bike so often?

15 loooong years ago!

the twins had their school dance on friday night having finished their " Brevet d'école" I managed to persuade them to stand still for 2 minutes when they got home the more observant of you will notice the shoes... Doc martins and Converse... They,ve both been accepted into the highschool we wanted for them so I am a justifiably proud father ( but don't tell them that)

weather is good here again and i'm not at work... I can't even sit up let alone get on the bike

I really like @Sir Fallsalot pic, moody skies and the red and green contrast, but for BIKE of the month it has to be Bob cos he's been proper riding, gon abroard an all!

Bob you Donkey! a steak " a cheval" is a ateak wih a fried egg on top of it! Horse steak would be" Steak DE cheval" bt on a menu would be " Steak Chevaline"

Oh dear!

happy belated late? yeah well I wasn't even invited to the party anyway was I...

https://www.femamotorcycling.eu/bike-transport-uk-eu/?fbclid=IwAR3DVk28nzbvkLjmjZIvDn0mto-P2q31YlAm7IgM-lKc6DOdxjLl4tWK6-M

hello anyway, plenty on here have imaginary friends already so if you're not real... no problem

No.1 daughters 20th birthday today so party last night in a local village hall where they all slept over (on the judo clubs tatamis I think ) then about 10 of them came round here bringing all the leftover food and drink for lunch which was fun. it was also bloody hot this afternoon and we've just had a brief but intense thunder storm go through.

ERM... is that a topbox I see on there?

pics or it didn't happen!

oooh, you don't wanna do that, not with this lot, you might catch something nasty!

we have direct messaging?! nobody tells me anything!

I never said you were consistant...

well I was going to say that one but Pete has spent the last 20 odd years shouting " Honda's are gay" at his potor screen everytime he sees one so I kinda ruled it out. Maybe this'll be his coming out?

I reckon the tracer cos its another UJM POS, boring but fonctional. like the chintok teuton, but Jap.

fucking morons. you voted out, now Fuck Off!

I just use my phone Pedro, for trips like this I use Kurviger.de to plan the route on the laptop, mostly because of its versatility. I then have an app on the phone called "scenic" and I can upload the route directly from Kurviger on the laptop to Scenic on the phone. Again Scenic is very adaptable ( possibily a litle too much so, with more options and functions than I can deal with ) but I cn now make it do what I want. This set up alloed me to plan the route weeks ago. I fine tuned it and uploaded each of the 4 days seperately 2 or 3 days before I set off and then just opened each one as I needed. pretty stress free navigation really, but as with any navigation system it has glitches and shortcomings which need keeping an eye on. I also carry paper maps of where I'm going, cos these things are prone to failure at critical moments...

Day 3 Capestang - Ambert. this one is photo heavy. The scenery was f'kin awesome and the roads were pretty good too. I was up early, 06:00, cos I wanted to be able to take my time today as the GPS said 7h 27 minutes riding time. Factor in to that the fact that I tend to take a break every hour or so, plus a longer break at lunch, photo stops, refuelling etc then I based my plan on taking 10 hours to get to destination. I haven't done a 10hour day on this bike, nor on any bike since I was about 20 years younger so this was something of a test and had been planned as such. I was away by 7 and hopped on the autoroute for an hour to skirt rapidly round the north west of Beziers and get the boring bit out of the way. I exited the autoroute and stopped for a coffee in a car sharing bay right by the autoroute entrance. looking north, this is where I was heding Once I'd climbed the switchbacks almost to the top I was rewarded with a view south over the plain The more observant of you will notice that tigrou now has an airhawk seat pad that wasn't there yesterday. I had it with me but didn't know if I'd need it or not having never needed it on this bike before, but ...yeah... I needed it! It's not miraculous but it allows me to push the stops further apart. over the top and down t'other side into the next valley. do you see the switchbacks on the road below? Down into the valley and up the other side, over the crest and down again, it just goes on and on... untill the gps lost the plut completely and sent me up here ( this where I discovered that I hadn't set the "no gravel or dirt" button and also where I had to remove the liners from jacket and trousers cos it was getting hot in the sun and sodding about with a fookin great fully loaded bike on tiny steep gravel tracks had me in a muck sweat. This is where I turned round. another time and in other circumstances I would have welcomed it but not here, not alone, and not fully loaded. As usual the image just doesn't convey how steep this was. I had to back track 15 minutes to get back on course which annoyed me as I really didn't need to waste the extra 45 minutes all that had cost me. the bloody thing sent me up another clearly signposted dead end half an hour later which cost me another 20 minutes fucking about trying to figure out what was wrong. Clearly it wasn't able to apply the new settings to a previously recorded route and in trying to get me back on track was using the settings as per the original route... I looked up the next waypoint on the route plan which I think was Florac and used coyote to get me there. from there I could then bring the Scenic app back into play as I was back on the original planned route. I stopped in Florac for Lunch in a small restaurant, Simple steak chips and salad 15€, Aubrac steak so VERY good but it took forever and I spent an hour and a half there in all. Once out of Florac the road started climbing again up towards Mende and the high plateau. the road culminates at around 1400m altitude and some of the minor cols wre still closed The temperature dropped pretty fast as the altitude increased as well and I soon regretted having taken the thermal liners out. The liners in my jacket are very effective but somewhat fastidious to put in and out. I stopped here and as a compromise put the rain liner in on it's own which though not thermal, is an effective windbreak. There was still plenty of snow around and the wind was bitterly cold so I didn't stop here for long but pushed on down into the valley beyond. I came across a roadsign that I didn't know existed. Well, as they've gone to all the trouble of making a sign an' all, be rude not to really... so I did and much fun it was, steep tight twisties, poorly surfaced and absolutely blind. No room to pass either but luckily I didn't meet a tractor or a herd of cows coming up the other way. Once out of this valley it was a fairly straight forward run up the N88 to Ambert Once I got to ambert I fuelled up ready for the next day, bought some food for the evening and rode the final 6 km to the Auberge de Jeunesse ( Literally Youth Hostel) where I can't help feeling something of an imposter, not really being part of "La Jeunesse" anymore I had the entire place to myself for the evening and the warden only appeared to put more wood on the fire, take my 17€ for the night and tell me to help myself to the kitchen and equipement. Day 4 Today was just planned as a long slog home, so I was up at 7 and away by 8. the weather was ok but a heavy rain front was moving north and I was determined to outrun it. I crossed the Loire eastbound at Gannay sur Loire and took the only pic of the day I planned on a lunch stop at Chatillon en Bazois or thereabouts and came across a nice looking restaurant in a village called Ahuy I could find no menu posted outside but the phone came into its own again, and that was an inspired decision, their menu's started at 56€! ( remember that tight fisted thing?) I hightailed it outta there like i'd been bitten despite what the internet might say, there are NO restaurants still open in Chatillon en Bazois... As I rolled into the supermarket car park in search of a sandwich I saw a tiger 800 xcx fully loaded alongside a honda x tourer loaded with panniers and top box but no extras. I parked alongside a found them sitting outside in the drizzle eating a sandwich having suffered the same fate as I, lied to by the internet and let down by the restaurants. we chewed the fat briefly and the pair left heading North ( a guy and his grand daughter, believe it or not) on their way home from a short " shakedown" trip in preparation for a trip to mongolia that has obviously been put on hold for the moment as riding across russia is clearly out, and most of the "stans" still have closed borders. they'd suited up in rain gear befor leaving which was fine, as it meant that it promptly stopped raining . I grabbed a sarnie and something to drink and headed off in their wake. I soon caught them up but didn't need to push past as I soon turned eastwards as they headed north and west to pick up the main road back to paris. I found a bus stop to have a break in, out of the rain which had just started again but more out of the wind which was picking up. I Gambled a bit on fuel usage in order to not have to stop for a final fuel-up as the weather fron was pretty much up with me by now and I was trying to make it home in front of the main body of rain. I did so with 70 odd km range showing ( reserve light comes on around 60 usually) and 15 minutes before the rain came down like a cow pissing on a flat rock... I'll add some stats later but I now need to go wash the bike.

I think it's the only time I have ever used the phrase " You have got to be fucking kidding me!" in the context of scenery.

Day 2 With an easy mornings ride planned for today I had a bit of a lie in and wallowed in the luxury of a a hotel for a while, which then included numerous visits to the breakfast buffet where their strategy of supplying mini croissants and pain au chocolats in the hope that people just take one failed miserably. I also managed to sneak my flask in for a passage under the spout of their coffee machine... I looked up how to get to the viewing area for the famous Millau viaduct but the only answer seemed to be via the autoroute and the bridge tolls. Not happy about that ( tightwad!) i determined to get my paper map out and work a route where I could get close to the viewing area without paying. As I loaded the bike in the garage, the hotel handyman came out of his little workshop in the courtyard so I asked him. " of course," he replied, " you go up to Le Cavalerie, but you'll see nothing today..." The cloud base was effectively low in the valley, but I decided to try anyway. The road going on from that view point had a sign saying " narrow road. passing dificult. Use passing points." That sounded like fun, and as it went in the right direction I decide to give it a go. Steep and narrow it was, and at the top there were some lunatics preparing to leap off the hill top with a tent strapped to their backs ( parasailing I believe they call it) but in almost zero visibility!? Nutters I tell you! I mahaged to get one pic of the scenery through a break in the clouds but the rest of the mornings ride was done in miserable conditions, cold, wet and at an average of about 30km/h as the visibility was at times down to about 50 metres and these mountain roads don't have barriers... I eventually ended up in Capestang around half 12, having had an interesting jaunt off road when the road leading into Capestang had a big barrier across it saying " Road closed for maintenance" no other information and no deviation signs. I turned left and let the Scenic nav app re calculate the route. I had, unfortunately NOT ticked the box marked "avoid gravel or dirt roads" which wasn't a problem usually as I had the planned route prgrammed in but once off the planned route... nothing difficult or nast, just gravel and dirt for about 5 km whilst we boxed round the closed section, and then we arrived at the port in Capestang as the sun came out. This was my nights lodgings, and a handy restaurant right on site provided a Burger, chips and salad Lunch for 16€. The plan was to raid @Tango's larder and fridge for evening meal as he had, perhaps foolishly, suggested he feed me that evening. Unfortunately my oppo who runs the base here and who was not working today had left a message to say that he'd be coming in specially this evening so 's we could go for a meal. I couldn't decently refuse, so had to indecently turn down Tango's very kind offer of turkey curry. Once I'd fed and watered, i rang Tango to see where he was at but the phone number he'd given me didin't work... My immediate thought was " shit, somebody's warned him...". Well I had plenty f time so I left him a PM on here ( wonderful clever things these 'ere smart phones) and rode the 30 odd minutes into Narbonne where I'd stop and see if he'd replied, if not then I'd go see the sea. He had replied and still denies he gave me a duff number on purpose... I spent a pleasant couple of hours drinking his tea and grubbying his sofa with my roadstained person and I can safely say he's another person off this forum who's a thouroughly nice bloke and meeting him was a bonus to the trip. Thanks @Tango. I had to run out on him before his Mrs came home and was predictably late for meeting my colleague but hey, I'm supposed to be on holiday right? At least this way the company paid for a feed.