Welsh Weekend with the Adventure Riders

What a great weekend it was too! It was a really sunny and lovely weekend weatherwise but I got wet, cold and muddy despite that. Probably that was because I rode my bike up and down Welsh mountains and along lanes that had been chosen by folk like me - in search of some wonderful off-road riding.

I signed up on the Adventure Rider forum for a so-called Equinox Rally Novice weekend and the results are to be seen here I have nothing but praise for the organisers who had gone to endless trouble to sort out routes that were suitable for a largely unknown and mixed bunch of riders coming from all over. The weather for the previous several weeks had been anything but encouraging and I was very doubtful that the event would actually take place. As I was in Italy with LOML until a couple of days before, I had only one day to read the forecasts and weather history and then to decide it was probably worth the effort and then to pack all the camping gear for the weekend. As this was to be on the 800 sans trailer, it was a new experience for me. Needless to say, I packed too much as usual. I used half the clothes I took and still felt somehow overdressed but wanting something different.

The riding was exceptionally good. A great mix of mud, rocks and broken bones - thankfully not mine but requiring two helicopter medevacs in any case. These were performed by the Welsh Air Ambulance service and what a terrific job they did. So much so that we are all now contributing to this charity organisation.

I am pleased with this picture that Timpo took of me. He really caught the water as it sloshed into my helmet!

See the rally pix for more of this sort..

One thing caught me by surprise - we were doing a route called Strata Florida and went past a load of wreaths that had been laid for the young girl who had died in a recent flood when the 4x4 she was in had been swept away by the river at a crossing. We crossed at the same point on bikes and there was no danger of being swept away (I think) but it is crystal clear that conditions can and do change very quickly.

We crossed the river many times and went through so many very deep puddles that I feel quite at home in the water now although I`d hesitate to tackle it by myself having found out just how easy it is to fall down and get a leg trapped under the bike. The trouble is the rocks under the water are unseen, slippery and odd sizes - there`s just no way of picking a way through them unless you can see them from well above - as we did on a couple of occasions when there was a bridge alongside a ford.

I was delighted to find such a nice group of folk who like off-roading. They were very kindly disposed to all the newbies and helped me countless times in picking the bike up and in encouraging me up various routes that I would nt have had the courage to tackle on my own.

I was pleased with the performance of the F800GS, it performed very well and only sustained one broken mirror as a souvenir of three days of abuse. It seems to love dancing over rocks (or at any rate, I do) whilst the mud slogs are not such fun. To be honest, I have never felt so tired as when paddling the darn thing trough some of the two feet deep ruts that we had to contend with. Still it went through several where the bigger 1200`s got stuck on their cylinder heads and had to be picked up and pushed through such sections.

One tip I learnt from Robbie C was to use second gear and spin the rear wheel fast, so that it flung off the mud clogging the treads. This helped a lot in gaining traction in the really boggy bits.

New Kent Wings Site

The website of the Kent region of GWOCB has been dormant or non-existent as long as I have had my Goldwing. I think this is a pretty poor show for one of the largest regions of the parent club. I took it on myself to set up a site for the club here.

It`s also in the blogroll at right. I am pretty happy with the site as it stands at the moment although it`s brand new and untested at the moment and could provide plenty of fun and games before I can feel confident it is actually robust against hackers and spammers etc.

As always, it`s content that is king but since it is a new site there is not a lot there at present. I really hope the members use it and that it also becomes attractive to visitors. The amount of effort I shall spend on it is not unnaturally related to this sort of statistic although I do appreciate that an investment of effort up front is needed.

Getting the site to it`s present state took more time than I envisaged. First I tried to select forum software. My first thought was to use phpbb which is so ubiquitous but then a search of comparison matrices led me to SMF via expensive stuff like VB and Expression Engine (EE). There seemed no clear advantage to using software one had to buy, a view confirmed when I spent a whole day trying to get to grips with EE and in the end only succeeding in duplicating what took about 30 seconds with some of the freeware forum stuff. SMF looked like a winner until I added the complication of wanting a portal for the forum, so that extra pages of stuff and a front door could be added. Finding a portal/front door combination that suits suddenly turns out to be the Holy Grail, Google kept saying as much so it must be true, right?

After flirtations with Tiny Portal and a couple of others I tried MKportal. This, it turned out, was now packaging forum software with it (AEF, some new Indian start-up). At first this looked ideal; set up was easy and it looked pretty and it had great skins/themes. Unfortunately, functionality was not great and things like a calendar turned out to be mere stubs waiting for some future development.

So, after a long couple of days, I finally settled on MKPortal and SMF as the best combo. I think both are really good, fairly mature pieces of work that provide both ease of set-up and power in use.

Let me know what you think!