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Hi All
Right, back from our 5 day jaunt, great fun all in all.
Day 1 (480 miles) Left St. Albans in the rain 5am on Thurs and headed to Dover picking up a couple of mates, one on a brand new R1, the other on a GSXR750 along the way. Fuel light came on after 80 miles....concerning and just made it to Dover before refuelling! Got the 7.45 crossing and headed away from Calais by 11.15.
We decided to hammer the autoroutes on day 1 in order to allow us as much time as possible in the Black Forest and the Austrian Alps, so not much to say about day 1 other than it rained until about 3, I was getting through fuel like nobody’s business but we covered 500 miles and I used 5 tanks of gas! We stopped off in the town of St. Die, refuelled ourselves and got some shut eye.
(Just before we left I had a set of RG3 pipes fitted to my MV and I took the bike to Red Dog M/C’s in Potters Bar who balanced the throttle bodies and fitted the MV chip for these pipes. At the end of day 1 the back of the MV was black with carbon from the pipes!!! I don’t know why but for some strange reason I took the original chip, and with some careful and light fingered work decided to swap the chip for the original and see if that made a difference...)
Day 2. (250 miles) Left a very sunny (hurrah) St. Die and headed on our way past Frieburg across the Black Forest and across the top of Lake Kontanz...it must take half an hour to drive the length of it...huge and beautiful! Away in the distance we could see the foothills of the Alps, it was fantastic! So down to Bregenz, pulling of the main road where we began our ascent at around 4pm. With quite a few cars on the winding roads you couldn’t travel at any real speed but moving slowly meant we could soak in the scenery. I was leading the way and ended up a few minutes ahead of the other guys, this is where I got carried away and while glancing over the road at a Fräulein I missed our turn to Lech, got carried away with the scenery and bumbled on for another 20km! Oops. The other guys without the same distraction as me made the turn and thought I had gone ahead, so I caught up with them in St. Anton 20 minutes later. So as the area expert having been to the region a dozen times or so I arrived a little red faced but the good news was the bike was sweet as a nut and swapping the chip had done the trick.
Day 3 (280 miles) Left St. Anton with sore heads but again in glorious sunshine and headed across the Arlberg to a place called Stuben where I stayed many times, said hello to a few friends before heading towards Bludenz and St. Gallen. When we crossed into Switzerland we purchased our Swiss ‘tax disc’ 26 euros, (bit of a pain as we were only going to be in the country for an hour or so......OR SO WE THOUGHT! We decided as we wanted to get to the Nurbugring to hit a few motorways and get a few miles under our belts. 20 minutes later 2 police cars pull along side us and herded us into a parking area. Looking bemused we asked them what the problem was, to be told we had a passed a car on the inside and we had been speeding. We were then asked where our ‘tax disc’ was, so we all open our wallets and proudly showed them off only to be told this was against the law and they have to be stuck to the bike....I could go on for ages but the crux of the situation was we had ridden 128 kmh in a 120 kmh limit (6% over the limit), we explained that although frowned upon bikes filter all the time in the UK and that 10% excess of any speed limit is acceptable...all to no avail! Then the Gestapo turned up, made us in turn put our leathers/lids on, sit on our bikes and we were photographed from 5/6 different angles each! Then came the fines £50 for speeding 8 kmh over the limit, £150 for passing on the inside and wait for it £50 for not sticking our sticker on the fairing. As well as holding us for 2 hours we were fined £250 EACH £750 in total...you can imagine the language!
This put a fair old dent in the days proceedings, so feeling a trifle deflated and hating anything to do with the land of Toblerone we made for the nearest Swiss exit and got about 30 miles north of Strasbourg before we were done for the day. Our intentions had been to finish the day near Koblenz in order to make ‘the ring’ the following day before heading up to the Biker loft hotel on the Belgium coast.
Day 4. (350 miles) We had to make a decision, hammer it to the ring squeeze in a lap or two and hammer it to Belgium or take a more leisurely ride to Belgium, in the end we all felt we might be over cooking it to make the ring so we ambled up to the Belgium coast and as it happened we got to the Biker loft by around 2.30 so had a really relaxing afternoon with a few beers, enjoyed a BBQ and a great live band and fell into bed at 3 in the morning.
Day 5. (200 miles) A hearty breakfast, followed by a blast along the coast to Calais for the last leg of the journey. A 2pm ferry saw us all home by around 4.30. Isn’t it great when you get back to blighty and realise A) how crap our roads are and worse still B) how crap UK drivers are compared to those on the continent....got home, collapsed.
All good fun, can’t wait till next year, thinking of putting the bikes on the motorail to the south of France having 4 days just in the mountains and then back home on the motorail again...watch this space
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