The bike is now standing outside our garage waiting to be unloaded while I have a cup of tea for the first time since I left home.
Well all things considered I reckon I’ve had a decent road trip. I grabbed myself 3 new countries to add to the list of ones I’ve ridden my bikes in which is good but every year that target gets a little bit tougher though nothing’s impossible and I’ve got a year to keep changing my mind before getting on the ferry and wondering where the fuck I’m going to
In the end I covered just over 3.5k miles, did 60 hours worth of riding and thanks to that handy little road trip app that I use when I’m away I know that I’ve spent £366.23 on fuel and got an average of 55.7mpg. Add in ferries, hotels, food, drinks and bribes makes me think I’ve spent about a grand which would have paid for a nice little all inclusive week at a beach resort. Well fuck that, I wanted to ride my bike
High point? Now I’ve had time to consider it I reckon buying my licence back takes that prize.
Low point? Being told I was banned for speeding.
Would I do it again? Not unless I spent a lot longer and went with my wife. When I’m away on my own I don’t stop to look at the scenery and take photos, I just look at the sights as I zoom around and if I think somewhere was particularly good I go back another year and spend some time there. It works for me and to be honest if I’d stopped for a look at places like Gothenburg, Stockholm, Helsinki, Riga and Vilnius I’d have needed at least another week and I still wouldn’t have spent any time in the smaller towns that I rode through and thought they looked worth a stop to wander around for a few hours.
The only day off I had was in Tallinn which I’d wanted to visit for ages and I’ll fly there for a long weekend with the wife at some point in the future.
We’ve been talking about taking the motorhome to either Imatra for the road races or the MotoGP when it finally gets to Finland and now I’ve ridden it I think it’d either be use the Frederikshavn - Gothenburg - Stockholm - Helsinki route both ways and take two weeks or add a third week and come home through Estonia and the way I’ve just ridden. The route I took to get to Finland was easy and is less than half the mileage of the route I took to get back so if anyone reads this and thinks about going there all I’d say is you can do the whole thing on a bike in a fortnight but it’ll be a hard ride home if you leave the circuit on the Monday morning and go home the long way.
The KTM, well what can you say about a bike that’s been stupidly overloaded, ridden for 8 hours every day and hasn’t had more than a cursory glance at the oil level every morning? I lost one of the bolts that holds the Ventura rack together but luckily the straps holding my rollbag to it stopped it swinging over to one side so I rode the next 200 miles knowing it was a bit dodgy. The next morning I looked for my little bag of spare fasteners and remembered it’s on the garage floor here at home so I had a look over the bike to see where I could remove a bolt that’d do the job. That’ll be one of the ones holding on the rear grab rail so that’s what I did. The originals were M8 countersunk screws and they’ve had a habit of coming loose before so I really should have used some threadlock on them but didn’t. If I hadn’t had the additional straps on there then it would have been messy and having the whole lot swing round like a pendulum would probably have seen me on my arse. Anyone thinking of using the same system needs to be careful and either use threadlock or check them every time they stop if they’re on shit roads. I’ve only noticed one other fastener missing and it’s one of the ones holding a side panel on but once I’ve ripped everything off the bike and given it a clean I’ll check everything else is tight and where it should be.
I’ve still got plenty of meat on the tyres which have now done 5k miles but they’re a bit square so unless I can get same shape back into them by acting the idiot around here I’ll change them for some more rounded ones. They still felt ok even when filtering on wet roads white lines can make the bike squirm around a bit and my little blast around the Erzburg region on Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning didn’t have any nasty moments so that was good.
It’s been fun.