First impressions were encouraging

My passion for Goldwings began in 1979 when I first saw a GL1100 Plain Jane in John Taylor’s Honda centre in Stoke on Trent.  They don’t look that big to us now but believe me back in ‘79 they were awesome.  I  set my heart on one there and then.

However then, as now, new GoldWings were expensive beasties.  I finally got my first Wing in 1989, a Martini Gold GL1500.  Then I had a Candy Apple Red 1500 SE and currently a Monaco Pearl Blue GL1800.  I also had a GL1000KZ project bike somewhere in the middle.  But I’ve always had a hankering for a GL1100 Plain Jane – a Wing so different in concept to the current ‘Full Dressers’.

So I started to look for one a few months ago. continues………

Swiss Alpine Tourers is a group of bikers who like to get together once each year to ride alpine roads on a grand scale.  They care not for clubish rules or structures of any kind and they are no longer even loosely a GoldWing-riding group; it matters only that riders are serious, indeed preferably  completely bonkers about alpine riding.

These days SAT is, since it’s certainly not a club, effectively the fiefdom of a British-born rider called Jed Halpern who has lived in Switzerland for many years and who continues to organise an annual, week-long and seriously intensive session of alpine riding.

SAP X-Trémé Tours, as the annual gatherings of SAT are now known, involve an opportunity, by virtue of staying overnight in the same sequence of three hotels in different parts of the Alps and their surroundings as like-minded riders, to ride together.

And that’s as far as it goes and as much as you get to know unless you sign up to join.  It’s made clear that it’s not a guided tour – you will be in the right place at the right time to ride with other alpine riding afficionados but it will be up to you what you do with the opportunity.  Jed will tell you where the hotels are once you’ve paid your money, so you will know where to head for on Sunday August 7th 2011, when the Tour starts,  and Jed has also revealed that the riding he has in mind will take you to six different Countries.  But otherwise, as tours go, this one is a bit of a mystery. continues………

This is not an ordinary motorcycle travel story and it’s certainly not a travel guide.  The author’s aim , somewhat eccentrically, was to cross Africa in order to meet people and drink tea with them and then take the used tea bags with him on to Cape Town, so that someone could paint and then sell them.  He also chose to travel down the western side of Africa on a British road bike – which involves an almost impossibly challenging route.

Although Alan was (and still is) a biker before he dreamed up this trip, he probably wouldn’t have seen himself as an expert rider, at least not at the sort of riding he was to encounter on this journey.  Maybe no one could ever become an expert at this sort of thing;  some parts of the route turned out to be mission impossible.

There was also the challenge of keeping the bike going and Alan wasn’t exactly a DIY repair expert when he started out either, although he did take the precaution of having an expert available back in UK on the end of a phone.  Not that phones were easy to come by either of course, or hotels, or food, or petrol stations or much of anything at all in some places.

This is a very readable book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Alan was trained as a journalist and he writes a good story which also comes across as very honest – including about his own most difficult and least proud moments.

He describes some very interesting and impressive people and some pretty unappealing ones too.  The places and situations come to life in the pages of the book and sometimes, as he describes very clearly, he got himself into pretty scary situations.

This was a journey of real adventure, of which I personally stand in very considerable awe.  Alan ended up in places and situations which were pretty awful by the standards of anything many of us will have ever experienced.  And the same will have been true for Alan when he set off on this journey; he’d been to Africa before but not this way and not to these parts of it.

African Brew HaHa is published by Summersdale and listed at £7.99 but it’s available from Amazon for less than this.  You can also read more about Alan and his journey on Alan’s own website by clicking here.

Buying things like a TV over the internet is a relatively new experience for me, indeed I’ve still only done it once so far, although I’ll probably be doing it again soon, the way things turned out.

It was my biking mate Bill who came up with the idea of buying from Amazon when he needed to replace a TV about a year ago.  I could understand buying books from them, I’d done that before very successfully – but a TV?

Bill had done his search for good value and discovered that Amazon were offering a Toshiba TV at a bargain price.  A decent make, a very good price, only £8 extra for next day delivery so he went for it.  Bill has been known to make spectacular errors buying things over the internet, notably entering £47,500 as a bid on EBay because he got his noughts wrong, but this time he must have got it right first time.  The TV arrived as promised the following day and within minutes, Bill being Bill, it was set up and working.  He barely missed a single episode of Teletubbies after his old TV had given up the ghost, so quickly did all this happen.

He was so chuffed with this rapid delivery of a bargain TV that he passed the idea on and I decided to continues………

A stylish badge - don't you wish you'd earned one?

It was a lovely autumn day for it – dry and sunny, if a bit cold early on, as bikers gathered in the car park of the Petre Arms at Langho, just off the A59 and not far from Blackburn for the first “666 Run” to the official Launch the 2010 Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal in Manchester.

Despite this new event not having been widely publicised, at least not on the internet, there was a very decent turnout of bikes – somewhere between 100 and 150 in total.  Maybe it was the smell of the bacon butties that the Pub were selling that did it.

Motorcycle Runs in support of the Armed Forces have been something of a boom industry recently and quite apart from doing right by our military and their families, which is of course what lots of bikers want to do, they provide opportunities for bikers who wouldn’t ordinarily meet let alone ride together to enjoy each others company for a few hours.

As we were having to stop/start repeatedly in traffic on the way into central Manchester I found myself alongside a very smart-looking Hayabusa.  “Your bike wasn’t really made to do this sort of thing was it?”, continues………

The J&M Diogital Music Player installed in the Trunk; the cable ties are to prevent the push-in plug working loose.

About a year ago J&M released a new product, an MP3 Player which could be installed on to a GL1800 as a substitute for the Hondaline CD Changer and then behave as if it was a CD Changer – by displaying the CD and Track number on screen as it was displaying and allow the use of the bike’s handlebar controls to change the equivalent of disc and track.

It’s a neat little thing hardly any bigger than an IPhone and it comes with a connecting lead which plugs straight into the multipin socket which Honda have provided for installing a CD Changer.  It’s fairly easily installed in the space under the trunk floor on a GL1800, the only tricky bit being to cut a hole of the right size and in the right position in the forward wall of the trunk for the cable to pass through.

I’ve had one of these on my bike for the past six months an although there has been a bit of learning continues………

INtellegent Battery Charger for £12.99

My Shopping Guru, Bill Squires, spotted these two bargains on offer at Aldi at the moment which are both potentially useful to Wingers.

Aldi is primarily a food retailer but very considerately they always have other lines in too which blokes will probably enjoy browsing through.  If you have to go shopping with the wife there are worse places to end up in.  Their non-food stock changes continuously and they seem to buy job lots of all sorts of things (or gets job lots of things specially made for them) to sell at low prices so “when they’re gone they’re gone” is usually the case.  It’s best to nip in and grab one if you don’t want to be disappointed.

At the moment they have two lines which might be of interest to Wingers; an electronically controlled battery charger and a large-size torque wrench, i.e. big enough to cope with the 85 ft.lbs setting used for a GL1800′s rear wheel nuts.  Both are priced at £12.99 which strikes me as very good value.

Torque wrench will cope with GL1800 wheel nuts

I can’t vouch for the quality of either tool because I haven’t used them or even seen them out of the box but at £12.99 they’re not an expensive risk to take.  I’ve bought tools from Aldi lots of times (including a garage compressor and a retracting air line reel) and I’ve not had a duff one yet.

The battery charger on offer at the moment is said to be microprocessor controlled and to have 4 charging modes, including one for regenerating old batteries.  The torque wrench look as if it should be OK too and it even comes with a couple of sockets an an extension bar inside its plastic case.  Aldi is a German Company but both of these tools will of course have been made in China.

Find the location of your nearest Aldi Store by clicking here.

Malcolm's Underground Lair (before tidying up)

The ever-helpful Malcolm Wright and his team live underground at Colin Appleyard GoldWing Centre at Keighley and therefore rarely see sunshine or even proper daylight.  But they nevertheless remain cheerful and welcoming and they have been tidying up and brightening the place up too in the expectation of winter visitors.  I barely recognised it when I called in last week to say hello.

The workshop is still busy, especially building trikes which is more or less a continuous process these days, but they’ve nevertheless put together some winter special offers.  I’d not appreciated they did before now, so I have decided to pass it on.

It’s a range of servicing and other services, including dry storage of your bike all winter if you want it, and collection from and delivery back to your door too if you wish.  And, since presumably even their workshop gets a bit quieter over the winter, they’re offering reduced labour rates on all servicing and repairs as well.

Ideally of course we all ride our GoldWings regularly over winter to keep the oil flowing and the electrics alive, but the idea of getting salt spray from our winter roads in UK anywhere near my bike is a serious discouragement and the thought of trying to ride a GoldWing on snow or ice seems completely crazy – so one way and another, despite the best of intention, I find myself riding only infrequently and sometimes not at all between December and March or early April, then it’s time to turn out for Appleyards Open Day (which is on April 17th in 2011) then off we go again, hopefully with another enjoyable biking season.

So professional mechanic services for under £40 per hour, MOTs for under £20 and winter-long dry storage complete with a charge-up and checkover for under £100 are not to be sniffed at.  There’s even an option to have the bike valeted for you before you either collect it or have it delivered to your door.

Ring Malcolm (or Barry) on 01535 606311 for further details.

The new BMW K1600 GTL

There has been relatively little in the way of competition for the GoldWing since the 1980s when it became established as the Grand Touring Motorcycle par excellence and the other three big Japanese manufacturers gave up trying to develop their own equivalent.  Above all it was the engine that did it; the GoldWing’s wonderful water-cooled, horizontally opposed four and later six cylinder, silky-smooth powerhouse.

Big V Twins could make louder noises on demand and their vibration can stir your prostate gland while you sit on them waiting at traffic lights (which is, I’m convinced, why Harleys have their macho appeal) but there was simply nothing to match a GoldWing’s engine for smooth and seemingly effortless power.

It might have taken some Wingers quite a while to warm to the GL1800’s styling, so radical a departure continues………

Chateau Amboise on the Loire

Apologies to regular visitors to this Blog for its relative inactivity during the past few weeks while I’ve been on holiday in France.  Internet access was a bit patchy and it wasn’t practical to do much more that publish the article I had pre-prepared and deal with Comments.   After the Blackpool Light Parade, Liz and I set off on holiday in our motorhome and, after some agonising on my part, left the bike at home.  The primary objective was to find some summer weather in which to relax for a while, so although there was a possibility we would end up in a biking area it was by no means certain so the bike and its trailer stayed at home.

About ten years ago we set off on a similar mission, in August when the weather should have been a sure continues………