tales from the country

It'll soon be three months since I moved into my cottage - on reflection, things haven't gone exactly how I'd imagined. The idea behind moving here was to be able to ride the bike to work on some of the best riding roads I've been on, and I have to admit that when the sun is shining it is the most fabulous journey; it's like my own personal road-race course, and it's a very busy day if I see more than 2 cars in the first 20 miles.

However, this is north-east Scotland, so in the first 5 weeks I only managed to get the bike down the muddy 1/2 mile track to the main road 3 times, mainly because it never stopped bloody raining! Just lately it's got a bit better, although this morning I was down to 20mph in the thickest fog I've seen since I was a kid and had to walk in front of my Dads Ford Esquire (a 100e van with windows if you're wondering)with a torch to see the kerb down Dagenham Heathway one Sunday night. But then that was before they brought in the clean air act and stopped us burning coal and old ladies dying from breathing in "pea-soupers". Bloody hell, that bit sounds like the 19th century!

Anyway, as I was saying it's been better weather lately so I've been out exploring; for some unexplained reason, ancient stone circles are 10-a-penny up here, with a local speciality being the recumbent stone circle (obviously I read all this in a leaflet www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/archaeology )which is your normal stone circle with an additional big stone laid on its side at one end between the two biggest stones (stop me if I'm boring you here). As the nice old lady said that I met in Midmar churchyard, where they built the new church (16th cent.) virtually on top of the stone circle (2500 BC..ish) - "that looks like where they performed the human sacrifices" and then after she walked away I found the internal organs of some animal lying on the ground inside the circle near where she was standing...ooh-er.

So I've been travelling around with my big OS map, riding up little tracks to find Bronze age hill forts, stone circles (I always walk round them 3 times clockwise, I think one of my ex-wives told me you had to do that to open the doorway to the next dimension...yeah, totally bonkers!), even Macbeth's stone, and Macbeth's well - yes the actual Macbeth that Shakespeare wrote about - although to be honest the stone was in a big field full of other stones so I'm not 100% sure I got the right stone - but it's all been educational and fulfilling and has stopped me going to the pub and getting sh*tfaced every night. In fact, all the exercise pushing the bike round gravel carparks has made me feel quite fit.

All in all, then, I have to say the experience of being a city boy living in the country has been...OK. I'll have to move back to town by the end of summer, as it's obvious I'll never get my car up here in the winter, let alone a bike - and I have new plans in that department anyway; have you seen that new Triumph Thunderbird?

Looks nice and I am getting too old to keep up with the young boys - oh I forgot to mention, young Derek had an accident two weeks ago, wrote off his ninja filtering down the dual carriageway between 2 lines of cars when one of them decided to change lanes without looking. He's alright, and the insurance company paid up right away; he's gone out and bought an R1 so there's definitely not a lot of chance of me keeping up now, so perhaps the cruiser is a good way of me saving face "sorry lads, you go on, this thing handles like shit".

Apologies for the length of this (as the bishop...)but the other effect of living up here is not speaking to anyone for days on end except those numpties I work with.

whats not to like?

6am Sunday morning sharing a bench in Cannes bus station with a comatose drunk and two weary hookers I watched the early morning sunrise glinting off the hulls of the mega-yachts in the harbour and thought to myself this makes a nice change.

A friend of a friend was looking for some help during the Cannes film festival, he wanted someone to drive a van advertising his film around Cannes so I thought that would make a nice little break – I mean, what’s not to like? I love driving, I like looking at attractive women, and here’s someone willing to give me free food and accommodation to do just that.

So I’ve just spent a week enjoying blue skies and warm sunshine; saw loads of famous film stars that I didn’t recognise (well they had loads of photographers around them so they must be famous, right?); and spent time studying the riding habits of our French biker cousins. They are MAD. They seem to show absolutely no sense of danger, weaving in and out of traffic at high speed wearing flip-flops and shorts. I also like the way they manage to smoke while riding; my favourite was the middle-aged gent puffing on a pipe as he chugged along looking rather like a two-wheeled steam train.

I was also impressed with the number of custom bikes, mostly Harleys of course; particularly interesting was the orange creation I spotted cruising along the promenade with an impossible riding position – full marks go to the matching crash lid with spikes on.

Back to reality now though – when I left Cannes it was 29 deg and sunny, here at my little cottage in NorthEast Scotland its 8 degrees and the rain has washed out the track so I can’t get the bike down it. Oh well it could be worse………

a little hide-away

There’s a fairly tenuous link to biking this week – I’ve just moved into a remote cottage at the edge of the Cairngorm Mountains. After spending the majority of my life living in cities I thought it would be nice to be part of the isolated rural idyll.

Well, to be a little more truthful, it appears that the present Mrs El Diente is about to become an ex*, so , basing my behaviour on the flight not fight pattern I’ve moved about as far away from London as is possible without falling in the sea.

But (and here’s the tenuous link) I can now commute to work by bike along some of the most picturesque yet empty roads I’ve ridden on; well I can in summer, anyway. Obviously in winter I shall have to buy a 4WD or move back to Aberdeen, but that seems a long way off so I just intend to enjoy it while I can.

*I like to think my Scottish ancestry has blessed me with a character that could be described as ‘reserved’; evidently this can also be interpreted variously as ‘miserable’, ‘moody’ and ‘grumpy old bastard’.

Charity run

The local bike club organised a charity run for breast cancer today. I took a selection of photos at the start this morning. My particular favourites are the lady biker with pink angel wings, the gold custom paint on one of the cruisers, and the guy with the biggest balls in the world who turned up on his restored 1961 Vespa scooter!

Hopefully I've managed to download the photos and they'll be beside this post as a slideshow. If not.....help!

Stop Press...yeah as you can see I couldn't do that slideshow thing. I'm bored now, I've spent all afternoon on Flickr uploading photos - curse this old age, I need a 10 year old to show me how to do this! Anyway, if anyone knows how to access Flickr, the photos are in eldientephoto under Sunday Charity Bike Ride.

Swop it or modify it?

I mentioned in a previous post that I was a bit disappointed with the wear properties of the OE Dunlop rear tyre on the bandit - completely shagged after 1400 miles! After reading a couple of intrnet forums I decided to try a dual compound tyre. Dunlop produce the Sportsmax Roadsmart which gets pretty good reviews, so I got the local bike-friendly tyre fitter to put one on for me. What a difference! Obviously I don't know how it's going to wear, but the bike feels much better to ride - no more squirming around in bends, and seemingly (this may be my imagination) much better general roadholding, although that may just be due to the roads finally drying out and not being covered in mud and crap.

I also had a test ride on a Triumph Tiger - after last weekends'longer ride left me with sore wrists and a numb bum I started thinking at my age it's time to get something more suitable to tour around on, but then a chance late-night trawl through some motorbike web pages turned up a set of handlebar risers guarenteed to take away the pain of touring.

I fitted them yesterday and then went for a run out; they seem to help with the general posture as today my wrists don't ache and neither does my back, and of course they're a much cheaper fix than buying that new bike. I'll give them a longer try-out today after I've finished work; hopefully the thick fog that spoiled my ride in this morning will burn off by lunchtime.

Derek's neighbour Alan was showing me his old AJS 350 single last night (its in beautiful condition) and we were comparing it to his BMW 1200 Adventure - it's about half the size and looks so simple to ride. But then we started to talk about biking in 'the old days', when the bikes needed constant fettling to keep them going, and how everyone fitted different bits to them to personalise them and make them more suitable for their own intended use; thats when I realised how ridiculous we've become - how could I think about changing my bike just 'cos my wrists ached; much better to make modifications to make it more suitable. Right , where's that accessory catalogue?

Hurray for biking!

Well that was the best fun I've had with my clothes on! Well apart from that massage in Wat Po but I won't go into that.

The weather over here on the east coast of Scotland has been rubbish all week, but every time I look at the weather forecast it looks like it's sunny over the west coast. So,I bought a new Givi screen for the bike, fitted a tail pack, printed out a map of the west coast of Scotland and set off to explore.

Saturday I drove along beside the river Dee as far as Ballater then turned north and rode over the Caingorms - bloody hell what fabulous scenery! The high point was riding for mile after mile along a single track roads with not one other vehicle in sight, just enjoying the scenery and the sunshine. Low point - looking in my mirrors to see a line of about 12 bikers coming up behind me at about twice my speed, each one weaving past as if I was a mobile chicane, waving, then disappearing off into the distance! I felt like a right knob.

The basic plan was to ride as far as possible, stop for the night and then ride again all day Sunday, but I did hit a couple of snags. Firstly is the abysmal mileage I get from the bike (caused I admit by inability to be gentle with the throttle)which means I have to stop every 100 miles for petrol. Secondly, and I'm open to suggestions how to get around this; I found it very difficult to ride fast AND enjoy the scenery, so much so that I was bimbling along at 50 mph for ages. And third (I know thats more than a couple) various parts of my anatomy began hurting after a couple of hours riding - wrists, arms and bum.

The upshot being that by 5pm I'd only made it to Inverness, although I had taken loads of photos and drank about a gallon of coffee in various roadside establishments. So I called it a day and stopped in a very pleasant hotel on the shores of Loch Ness. Crashed out early night.

But, and here's the bit I referred to at the beginning, that meant I could get up early this morning and start riding before the Sunday drivers appeared. The A82 south along the north side of Loch Ness was heaven! Bright sunshine, a completely empty road and enough gentle curves to alow me to ride at a reasonable speed while still enjoying the scenery.

A quick stop in Fort Augustus (more petrol and a coffee) and I took the B862 north along the south side of the Loch. This road goes through the Monadhliath mountains, is a single track, and looks like Colorado USA! Grand imposing mountains and forests, another empty road and I was in heaven. After that I gave up planning and just rode down every single-track road I came to, just generally winding my way south and east.

I stopped for lunch at some magical place near Cock bridge; there's this tremendous widing road all hairpins and steeply downhill, at the bottom is a tea shop. The road then hairpins its way back up and over the next mountain, so if you're sitting outside eating your lunch you hear the bikes coming down the hill all popping and banging, a quick blast past the teashop then screaming their way uphill - better than a racetrack. And all the time a huge clear blue sky and sun beating down.

Ride a bit, stop a bit, ride a bit more, stop for a coffee - what a way to pass a weekend! This is the life!

I finally got home about tea-time, washed the dead flies off me new screen and staggered upstairs to soak my aching body parts in a hot bath. Heaven! Hope you all had an equally good weekend - hurray for bikes!

roll on the light evenings, at least I'll be able to see

Went to a talk given by a local Bike Instructor last night, the topic being better cornering. No suprises, really,in the cornering techniques; just a reminder that we're actually supposed to be thinking about what we're doing as we ride, as opposed to my approach of just bumbling along in top gear with an occasional full throttle blast whenever I get bored. Of course there was one character there keeping up a hilarious running commentary/heckle - the finale was when we were told that police bike riders don't get trained at night-riding...yes, Gus is now going to do all his riding at night!

Had a fairly terrifying ride back along the country lines from the pub, evidently Suzuki fit candles inside the headlamp of my bike; I could actually see better ahead when Sean on the fireblade was behind me than I could with my own lights. The lads tell me I have to fit HID bulbs but I'm not sure if its something I can do myself, electricity being white man's magic as far as I'm concerned.

Of even more concern is the amount of tread left on my back tyre, so far I've done 1500 miles, and the wear bar in the centre of the tread is almost exposed. Now Derek managed 4000 miles on his ninja before he replaced them and he rides like a lunatic - either these OE Dunlops are really crap, or I'll have to moderate those full throttle blasts. Or learn how to ride banked over all the time.