Belfast 6:30am, grey sky, cold, rain, roads covered in diesel – I should have turned south last night. With the Northern Ireland haulage industry having such a hard time why don’t they use the fuel instead of pouring it over the roads? Convinced I was going to fall off in the last minutes of my trip, I tiptoed home.
Summary
What had I done?
7,281 kilometres (or 4,551 miles)
7 countries (Northern Ireland, Ireland, Wales, England, France, Morocco, Spain)
6 ferry crossings
48 days
1 fall
1 bout of ill health
Was it worth it?
Did I achieve what I set out to do?
In a traditional sense, no I didn’t. My plan went wrong on the morning of day two so I scrapped my plan. From then on each morning I just went where the road unfolded before me.
On a more personal level, I achieved everything I set out to do. Essentially I went on this trip because I read a book thirty years ago. I was in awe of a fairly ordinary person going off alone on his motorbike and, every day, dealing with riding unannounced into some different, remote place. The world has changed since Ted Simon’s trip and it is no longer possible to replicate it. In any case I don’t have the language skills, the bravery or the remarkable insight into people that Ted possessed. At various times in this trip, however, I did recognise situations and feelings that Ted had described.
Many people go through life either pretending that they don’t have dreams or being too afraid of failure to try living their dreams.
I feel very privileged to have lived, if not a chapter, at least a few pages from ‘Jupiter’s Travels’.
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Thursday 6th November 2008
Even at my best Leisurely Way Round bumbling speed I still arrived in Birkenhead with quite a few hours to spare. Has anyone ever found anything interesting to do for a few hours in Birkenhead? I’ll let you into the secret. A chat with two bikers outside the shopping centre and they insisted on leading me through the traffic to the brilliant biker pub – The Swinging Arm. Apologies to Eric, the landlord, that my camera battery ran out and I can only show a mobile phone picture of his excellent friendly pub. A short drive to the ferry terminal and it would soon be over. Should I just turn south instead?
Wednesday 5th November 2008
A state of the art Full English Breakfast left me with mixed feelings after so many weeks but I manfully fired it straight into my already dodgy arteries and set off northwards. I must admit that I wasn’t in any mad rush for my trip to finish and I went to the little village of Inkberrow near Worcester to have dinner with an old friend at the Flyford Arms. Steak and Ale Pie the way it should be with vegetables that weren’t cooked to death – it wasn’t exotic but it was very good.
Tuesday 4th November 2008
Sea calm, excellent (though overpriced) breakfast, table of bike travellers to talk crap with – perfection.
By the time we got to Plymouth we were all riding gods, we had plans in place to conquer the few remaining parts of the globe that hadn’t already benefited from our presence and, if memory serves me correctly, we had solved world poverty. Then I went down to the vehicle deck and found that my oil container had leaked all over my rear tyre. The chemical additives
in the oil had melted the paint off the deck and the rubber of the tyre had thus turned blue. A complete kitchen roll and a pack of industrial wipes later (really appreciated guys but you do need to attend a packing seminar) I still had the greasiest rear tyre on the planet. You don’t often see a riding god on his knees beside his bike whimpering quietly into his comfort blanket.
I had considered riding to Bristol even though it would have meant breaking my ‘no riding in the dark’ but in the circumstances I was more than happy to pull in to the Dartmoor Lodge. I assumed that I would be in for a solitary evening but two guys staying there on business were keen bikers and one of them was even a Ted Simon fan.
By the time we got to Plymouth we were all riding gods, we had plans in place to conquer the few remaining parts of the globe that hadn’t already benefited from our presence and, if memory serves me correctly, we had solved world poverty. Then I went down to the vehicle deck and found that my oil container had leaked all over my rear tyre. The chemical additives
in the oil had melted the paint off the deck and the rubber of the tyre had thus turned blue. A complete kitchen roll and a pack of industrial wipes later (really appreciated guys but you do need to attend a packing seminar) I still had the greasiest rear tyre on the planet. You don’t often see a riding god on his knees beside his bike whimpering quietly into his comfort blanket.I had considered riding to Bristol even though it would have meant breaking my ‘no riding in the dark’ but in the circumstances I was more than happy to pull in to the Dartmoor Lodge. I assumed that I would be in for a solitary evening but two guys staying there on business were keen bikers and one of them was even a Ted Simon fan.
Monday 3rd November 2008
Free coffee and a friendly send off from the bar staff eased the trudge through the snow to the bike. The road had been cleared but I had had to wait for the frozen snow round the bike to turn to slush before I could risk riding out. The snowploughs were still on station and the air temperature was very low but the motorway was completely clear and my progress was limited only by the cold affecting my hands. I got a pair of windproof over-mitts which lengthened the Mean Time Between Coffee Stops (MTBCS) considerably. As a result of this new MTBCS I actually enjoyed the ride to the north of Spain and arrived in Santander just in time to get some cash and a ferry ticket and get loaded onto the Plymouth boat. The sea was a bit rough and I was tired so I had a meal and went to lie down for 20 minutes. I woke up some hours later just in time to go to sleep for the night – the life of an adventure traveller – party, party, party.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Sunday 2nd November 2008
Woke up early but decided to wait for an hour to make sure there would be no ice on the next mountain pass at Puerto de Somosierra. As a result I missed the clear road by about ten minutes and had to slipstream a snowplough to get to the hotel about two kilometres from the top. The driving snow and thick cloud started really suddenly and I was lucky to spot the flashing lights of the snowplough at the start of the slip road to the hotel. The word was that this short stretch of road was the only bit to 
have snow, everywhere else had rain. By three o’clock I gave up and booked into the hotel for the night. A bedraggled English biker came into the bar around four o’clock having come from Bilbao in one day on his new Suzuki Bandit with his wife driving immediately behind in a car to give him some protection. He decided that he could go really slowly for two or three kilometres to get past the snow if his wife put on the car’s hazard flashers jut behind him. He returned about twenty minutes later having dropped the bandit, left it at the hotel and went on to Madrid in the car.
I was feeling pretty down at this stage but the day started to look up as an interesting collection of snowbound travellers built up in the bar. Two Dutch guys in a 30 year old VW beetle were competing in the Amsterdam to Dakar Challenge but like me they hadn’t prepared for snow. An English semi-pro musician and his wife were on the first stage of a move to Spain and turned into serious party animals once they accepted they were there for the night. He even performed a fine rendition of ‘the fields of Athenry’ for the Irish contingent. A Moroccan on his first trip home to Morocco for some years got quite excited about the places I had been to in his country and couldn’t believe that I had done it all solo on my first visit. The bar staff stayed on at the end of their shift and we had a good old-fashioned Irish pub lock-in on a snowbound mountain pass in Spain.
have snow, everywhere else had rain. By three o’clock I gave up and booked into the hotel for the night. A bedraggled English biker came into the bar around four o’clock having come from Bilbao in one day on his new Suzuki Bandit with his wife driving immediately behind in a car to give him some protection. He decided that he could go really slowly for two or three kilometres to get past the snow if his wife put on the car’s hazard flashers jut behind him. He returned about twenty minutes later having dropped the bandit, left it at the hotel and went on to Madrid in the car.I was feeling pretty down at this stage but the day started to look up as an interesting collection of snowbound travellers built up in the bar. Two Dutch guys in a 30 year old VW beetle were competing in the Amsterdam to Dakar Challenge but like me they hadn’t prepared for snow. An English semi-pro musician and his wife were on the first stage of a move to Spain and turned into serious party animals once they accepted they were there for the night. He even performed a fine rendition of ‘the fields of Athenry’ for the Irish contingent. A Moroccan on his first trip home to Morocco for some years got quite excited about the places I had been to in his country and couldn’t believe that I had done it all solo on my first visit. The bar staff stayed on at the end of their shift and we had a good old-fashioned Irish pub lock-in on a snowbound mountain pass in Spain.
Saturday 1st November 2008
Yesterday’s ride in the cold and rain had tired me so I slept late to 9.00 this morning. It was slightly easier and warmer riding today, partly because it wasn’t raining and partly because I was wearing all of my clothes. The limiting endurance factor was my hands which stopped working after about 80 kilometres. It’s a slow and fairly tedious business travelling the full length of Spain stopping every 45 minutes to warm your hands on a cup of coffee. I gradually let my motorway cruising speed edge up to get farther between stops. I stopped just south of Madrid to plan my attack on its notorious road system and saw that the rack had broken again just beside the previous repair. There was obviously a design weakness in the rear cross brace but it didn’t matter – this was Europe on a Saturday afternoon so no hope of a repair. I was really missing Morocco. I cautiously approached Madrid as planned on the A4 from the south and I departed from Madrid as planned on the A1 to the north. In between? Not a clue. I know that I maintained my stately progress at 80 kph in deference to my broken rack and despite encouragement to greater efforts from my fellow road users. In the memorable words of Terry Wogan on his allegedly fast lap of the Top Gear track, ‘I’ll be the judge of that’.Spain’s answer to Randalstown, Guadalix de la Sierra, provided a good hostel for the night. The staff in the Chinese restaurant loved my total incomprehension of their Spanish Chinese menu and fought for the privilege of confusing me further with their various and varied English translations. No idea what I ate but it was lovely and so were the staff.
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