Wow.. what an experience.. (I'm back home safe btw, ty for the comments).
I covered just over 4000 kilometres over 17 days (only 8 of them saw me in the saddle) as I travelled down from home (Mansfield) to Portsmouth -> Caen -> Limoges -> Grenoble -> Sanremo -> Pisa -> Florence -> Lans (Innsbruck) -> Metz -> Dunkirk -> Home.
Almost ran out of fuel whilst caught in the *worst* rain storm I've ever witnessed, saw snakes, lakes, waterfalls, snowcapped mountains, horrendous traffic, almost endless empty roads, sweated in 32 degree heat, shivered in 9 degree temps whist wet and doing a ton, rode twisties and horizon long straights, found a couple of excellent hotels, and a few crap ones. Bored myself to death on a few motorways, discovered aches and pains where aches and pains didn't exist before, almost got wiped out a couple of times, but almost wiped others out too, drunk myself to oblivion twice (in good company), met a few biker peeps of all walks of life .. all in all .. fantastic.
My new Roadtecs are now square though - could do with one of you racer types taking my bike out to put some less acute-angled shoulders on my rear tyre. Bike is in need of a good service and a bloody good clean and I'm looking forward to riding it again, but without the fat child sat over the back wheel. The bike didn't put a foot wrong, despite my ham-fisted wrestling of it at times. Tyres gripped, fuel economy was wonderful (thank god for that! .. I may have broken my previous 'fill-up' record, i need to check...). It started, ran and stopped flawlessly even though the Italian fuel seemed on the 'agricultural' side. Have to say that pulling out of the services on the autobahn on full chatter, accelerating to 150mph with a fat bloke and a heavy tailpack in a matter of seconds made me smile at the awesome capability of these bikes.
Can't wait for the next one...
