Introductions and background - Part 2
I bought the bike while living in Canada. I’d owned BMW’s for a few years (RT’s) but I’d always loved the GS and the PD was something extra special to me because they weren’t available in the UK where I grew up.
Although Canadian winters can be brutal, the rest of the year opens up some amazing countryside that just begged to be explored and the GS was the perfect bike with which to enjoy all that Eastern Canada had to offer.
Many weekends in the summer months were spent up exploring the logging roads and snowmobile trails in
Algonquin Park, you could ride dirt trails for miles every day and see things you could never normally experience - these are the days I miss most of all now I’m back here in the UK.
I remember one weekend in particular where I had taken a remote trail and managed to get stuck in a marsh - I was maybe 20 miles from the nearest road, there was no cell coverage (it was the late 90’s after all) and it took me over 6 hours and some Ray Mears ingenuity to get back on the road - I can still remember the feeling of elation as I emerged back onto the highway, covered from head to toe in mud...
But perhaps the pinnacle of her Canadian career with me was taking her on a three week trip to the
Trans Labrador Highway in the Autumn of 1997. I took the last ferry of the year from Newfoundland (before the passage starts to freeze up) and wound up in Goose Bay staring down the barrel of a three day ride through 300 kilometres of Canadian wilderness.
While in Canada I also fell in love with the Maritime provinces and New England both of which I found out could be reached within a couple of days (about 1,000 miles from Toronto) so we did a few trips out to the winding roads out east, mostly just for long weekends.
I used to love those road trips, this was way before the days of GPS routing software too. I had a basic GPS (Garmin III) that had a simple map and would just tell me a basic compass reading and if I was headed in the right direction or not. It turned out that was the perfect way to explore because you simply took whichever road you felt like as long as it was more or less in the right direction. I think we miss a lot of that kind of serendipitous discovery now because we just rely on instructions from the screen rather than leaving it (roughly) to chance. I would never have found any of the dirt roads if I’d used a modern GPS and would have missed out on a lot of the adventure.
After about three years of exploring and enjoying the beauty of that bike on Canadian trails, my job changed and took me back to Europe but not back to the UK, not yet at least. After a brief introduction to the UK at Dagenham where the bike was uncrated, I took her and her Canadian plates and rode on to our new home in Amsterdam...