Stuart’s GoldWing Blog

A Staggered Formation works well on motorways but don't forget to make room to allow other road users to cross your lane to enter or leave the motorway

The time-honoured way of keeping a Group Ride together, or at least getting them all to stay on route so they can meet up again at the next planned stop, is a system of marking turns on the route by getting a bike to halt at a turning point, so that the other bikes will know which way to turn. In other words a “Drop Off” system. There are several variations on drop off systems and I will come back to that subject in more detail later, in a future Article in this series. This one concentrates on motorway group riding, when of course drop offs cannot be used because it is both illegal and highly dangerous to stop on a motorway – so a very different approach is needed.

A short hop on a motorway in your home locality for your regular group of rider presents relatively little difficulty, although there are potential problems, so there is little need for elaborate planning. But the principles of group riding on motorways are the same however long or short your journey might be, and if you are part of a group which is trying to make a ferry deadline to get back to UK you might face quite a long motorway slog across what is in some parts of Europe quite a complex network of motorways. And then you really will need to give some thought to how to keep your group together.

The only reliable way I know of keeping a group together on motorways requires each rider’s willingness to keep up, willingness to keep a reliable eye on the bike immediately behind (so no swapping around the riding order, so no overtaking) and an understanding of what to do if the bike following you drops back or disappears altogether – which is to slow down, keep it in view for as long as possible, so the Leader gets to know by the knock on slowing down of the whole group that something is up. Of course if you are touch with the Leader by radio you can tell him that way, but not all bikes, and not even all GoldWings have bike-to-bike radios.

Slowing down deliberately should have a fairly rapid continues………

An extreme test of group riding skills -start of the 7,000 bike Wirral Egg Run!

Group riding is popular among Wingers; it can involve anything from two or three bikes going out for an afternoon in their local area to an adventurous European tour for a dozen or more bikes and sometime huge group rides like the Blackpool GoldWing Light Parade, which has involved over 300 bikes.  Large parades like that one require a special type of planning which is beyond the scope of this Article but the other two examples are fairly common, indeed I will be doing both types this coming year, so it’s worth considering how those can best and most safely conducted.

Is there a best way of doing group riding?  Some people seem to think so; they have their continues………

Randy Rodriguez

This Article was written by the Captain of the Central Florida Motorcycle Drill Team for the Community Newspaper which Randy edits in Titusville, Florida, which he has kindly allowed to be reproduced here.

A tale of refusing to grow up

“You don’t stop laughing and enjoying life because you get old. You get old because you stop laughing and enjoying life.”

I first heard that in high school. I don’t know who said it originally, but I thought it was profound then, and now that I’ve attained an age where many have stopped laughing, I find it to be simple truth. Some people cling to their problems so hard, they have nothing left to live and laugh for. continues………

Mont Blanc

Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Europe and sits right on the border between France and Italy.  The mountain has 48 principal, named and almost equally high very near neighbour mountain tops, so it’s really just one great big fat mountain called the Mont Blanc Massif with a multitude of summits.  There are no roads up that high, so riding around Mont Blanc on a motorcycle means riding around the whole lot.  Altogether, depending on the route you choose and your appetite for alpine twisties, this involves a minimum of 200 miles and probably more like 300 miles and climbing a dozen or more high Mountain Passes.

continues………

Overnight Stop in France

Why on earth would anyone want to tow a GoldWing on a trailer? Surely the whole point of owning a GoldWing is to ride it?
Quite so – but when you want to ride your Wing on the biking roads you can only find in places which are far from home, like the Alps, and you also value sleeping in your own bed every night, towing the Wing behind a motorhome to make the transit journey to a decent biking area becomes an attractive option. continues………

Nurburgring - The Nordschleife

My second biking holiday to Germany of 2008 was with a Lancashire IAM group. We were staying at the same bikers hotel, Hotel Zur Post, Klotten, for the whole week, so a very different type of biking holiday from a Winginit Tour. We were also close to the famous Nurburgring too.

This time a mixed group of bikes and mine was the only Wing. No bike to bike communications either and only a few of us had satnav. Of course in these circumstances a Wing tends to be a bit conspicuous and you get a bit of good humoured stick from the other riders, asking which pannier the dishwasher is in, that sort of thing. continues………

Although 2008 was a very busy year because of the Light Parade, I did manage to get to Germany twice on the bike; both trips were very good ones and also very different, illustrating the wide spectrum of what is possible on a Wing in the way of continental touring.

The first trip was with Elite Wings, or rather with Winginit Tours, which is what Ian Cardwell, one of the Founders of Elite Wings, calls himself when he is doing a private tour of his own. We were all riding GoldWings, mostly white ones as it happened, so we looked a bit like a parade of ice cream salesmen.  Many of us were revisiting Ohringen, a mediaeval town near the Black Forrest because much the same crowd had been there in 2005, to see their Town Festival. continues………