Nearly there !

Little Bro and I are so very nearly off on our first road trip.  Bikes have been fettled, camping gear checked and re-proofed and the weather even looks encouraging.  Assuming the status quo continues the fun begins on Friday 25th May.

The plan is to travel from Hampshire to the far Southwest coast of Wales via Symonds Yat for lunch on Friday.  After that we will travel up the coast to Aberystwyth, inland through Snowdonia and back home.  As kids we spent many happy holidays around this wonderful countryside.

Russ is planning to take the VFR800 and I will, of course, be riding Jessica but without the Old Dragon, sadly.  Apparently camping isn’t civilised behaviour !

I’m hoping to take lots of pictures and keep the blog up to date as we go.  It should be huge fun and we are both looking forwards to the trip immensely. We hope to meet fellow bikers as we go so if see a red Suzuki and a yellow Honda along the way, give us a wave.

Well it’s been a while.  Life has got very busy lately and with the weather the way it has been the opportunities for the Old Dragon and I to get out have been severely limited.  For my sins I have also been doing some work on the Ulysses UK website.  Hopefully there will be a new version up and running soon.

Anyway, more work has been done on Jessica all brought on by a planned 4 day trip around Wales at the end of the month with my little brother.  The rear suspension was stripped done to re-grease pivot points etc etc which revealed that the seals on the shock absorber were on their way out.  Strangely I have been finding the rear end a little bouncy around corners recently so it wasn’t that much of a shock, no pun intended !  Fortunately a cost effective used item in very good condition was sourced from a breakers yard and one worn out spacer in the linkage was found at Pro-Bike in Newbury.  The end result being a bike that handles considerably better and sailed through it’s MOT.  The only thing left to do now is to fit a 12v socket to charge a phone from and run a sat-nav and we will be ready to go.

On the subject of the MOT, I found a wonderful workshop that, if you’re in the area, you really should know about.  2 Brothers Motorcycles are fantastic guys.  I had heard rumour they were good but the reality is even better than I had been lead to believe.  These are proper bikers with a real love for bikes and utterly nice guys as well.  Please, support them if you can.