Emergency, two-day Wander 2/3/4 August

Ahoy! As they say in the Czech Republic :D

Thanks for the company, really enjoyed it.

Nearly 700 miles of sports bike daring-do, door-to-door.

Several bits of fun....

Running out of fuel (not me) before the Wander started :blast

Police (not me)

Dented car (not me.... But could have been later) :eh

Broken window (not me) :steptoe

Half decent 'stoppie' (me) :eek:

Police.... Again.... (All four of us)

Random breathalyser test (All four of us).... Just realised that one of our party had TWO breathalyser tests within 24 hours


I am not sure I could stand a week away :D
 
Ahoy! As they say in the Czech Republic :D

Thanks for the company, really enjoyed it.

Nearly 700 miles of sports bike daring-do, door-to-door.

Several bits of fun....

Running out of fuel (not me) before the Wander started :blast

Police (not me)

Dented car (not me.... But could have been later) :eh

Broken window (not me) :steptoe

Half decent 'stoppie' (me) :eek:

Police.... Again.... (All four of us)

Random breathalyser test (All four of us).... Just realised that one of our party had TWO breathalyser tests within 24 hours


I am not sure I could stand a week away :D

Wow.:eek: We're going to need some more info:D
 
Hmmmmm
:hide

That might be me















Stopped at a halt line at a Tee junction, and dozy local drove straight into the back of me.
No damage to the panzer, but the Toyota needs a new wing and bumper (good ad for ARD panniers :D )
And in the usual waving of arms and shouting at each other I managed to shatter the drivers window with my gloves :angel without even trying :toungincheek
Good stuff this adrenaline :augie
 
Yes, I thought this ride-out was a rather interesting one.
Good routes , good weather and a good riding pack, four was about right for this one, as a lot of miles was covered, we all kept together quite nicely.

So, I ran out of petrol .3 miles from the service station before I even got
on the train. Thanks to BMW re-calibrating my fuel gauge , I now have an offset of 22 miles.
That is 22 miles left means zero petrol left !
Thanks to the BMW rider who gave me a final push up the hill, never got your name, but thanks.

So onto the trip, left my phone charger in IBIS ( I am lost without mrs dxtans on the back to keep me in-line!). Neil had had an unfortunate accident, due to a car rearing up his back at a junction, some how in the confusion a window got smashed. The police I think were more interested in Richards bike then the actual incident procedure involved.

Got to the hotel in Vianden , I walked into a room ( 01 and 10 room numbers look the same to me), and found a (very) young couple cuddling on my bed, bit embarrassing, for them, looks like I got the wrong room!, oops !

Lovely ride back, and as Richards has noted, we got pulled over for a breathalyser test, all passed !

Thanks Richard for organising this, a long but very good couple of days on the bike.

Dxtans
 
Yup, coming back on our return route is a long way, getting on for 340 miles from Vianden to Calais, via Peronne, with only a little bit of motorway. But the weather was good, the roads near enough empty so we could all crack along.

You can do it in a small group but it would become difficult with many more bikes. My thanks to everyone for entering into the spirit and getting on with it; getting rolling at 08:00 on the Sunday was a real help. As it was we rolled into Calais at about 17:30 for a booked 18:50 train and (despite the queues) three of us found ourselves on an earlier train, probably around 18:20 which was a bonus.

Had we been very short of time, encountered a problem or just had enough, we could easily have jumped on the mototoreay at St Quentin to arrive in Calais within two hours at about 15:00. Similarly, getting going at 08:30 on Saturday morning gave us the luxury of an hour and a half pause near Clervaux whilst Neil did his bit for cross-border EU relationships; we still arrived in Vianden in good time for beers and scoff. It just shows the value of getting goining earlier, it being difficult to make up time later if there are not many escape routes available. It may also prove the value of having a paper map to back up a GPS; so much easier to work things out.

I will definitely do it again at some time. Little changes I might make might be:

Definitely stay with fuelling up the evening before. That really helped.

Stay as is for Saturday.

Sunday: As we rode past the suburbs of Ch-Mez, I remembered that there is a convenient fuel station that I had used before. I now have it marked on my GPS. The slight detour into Sedan didn't matter too much.

Maybe stop in the cafe at Liart, not in Bouillon, if only because we ride past it.

Maybe stop in St Quentin for a lunch and fuel break, instead of Peronne.

These are just suggested as notes to me to maybe ring a couple of changes for next time. The route we took works reasonably well, as the four of us proved. There is a couple of small glitches in the route, which I will tidy-up at some point.
 
Yup, coming back on our return route is a long way, getting on for 340 miles from Vianden to Calais, via Peronne, with only a little bit of motorway. But the weather was good, the roads near enough empty so we could all crack along.

You can do it in a small group but it would become difficult with many more bikes. My thanks to everyone for entering into the spirit and getting on with it; getting rolling at 08:00 on the Sunday was a real help. As it was we rolled into Calais at about 17:30 for a booked 18:50 train and (despite the queues) three of us found ourselves on an earlier train, probably around 18:20 which was a bonus.

Had we been very short of time, encountered a problem or just had enough, we could easily have jumped on the mototoreay at St Quentin to arrive in Calais within two hours at about 15:00. Similarly, getting going at 08:30 on Saturday morning gave us the luxury of an hour and a half pause near Clervaux whilst Neil did his bit for cross-border EU relationships; we still arrived in Vianden in good time for beers and scoff. It just shows the value of getting goining earlier, it being difficult to make up time later if there are not many escape routes available. It may also prove the value of having a paper map to back up a GPS; so much easier to work things out.

I will definitely do it again at some time. Little changes I might make might be:

Definitely stay with fuelling up the evening before. That really helped.

Stay as is for Saturday.

Sunday: As we rode past the suburbs of Ch-Mez, I remembered that there is a convenient fuel station that I had used before. I now have it marked on my GPS. The slight detour into Sedan didn't matter too much.

Maybe stop in the cafe at Liart, not in Bouillon, if only because we ride past it.

Maybe stop in St Quentin for a lunch and fuel break, instead of Peronne.

These are just suggested as notes to me to maybe ring a couple of changes for next time. The route we took works reasonably well, as the four of us proved. There is a couple of small glitches in the route, which I will tidy-up at some point.

It was a good weekend out - thanks all.

Had a great time.
Glitches - if you can call them that - are part of the trip.

Its not only the Spanish that can cause queues at the Border Control either - never seen that many cars trying to get back to the UK and yet the train carriage infront of us was empty. - Logic and sense goes out the window.
 
The Chunnel trains sometimes run with empty carriages only because there is a fault with it.

These faults include:

(a) No fire detection

(b) No air conditioning working

By and large the trains themselves work well and are a quantum leap on the rusty tub known as P&O.

The queues at the passport desks are beyond Eurotunnel's control. The bods in the tea huts were in extra zealous mode.... rejoicing that Uncle Sam had been tipped off that someone might be delivering a dodgy pizza to their embassy in Cairo over the weekend. Me? I'd scrap the bloody lot and instead concentrate on not getting UK plc into quite so many scrapes around the globe.
 


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