Trailer Time

Yesterday I went off to North Walsham to pick up my new trailer at Freewheel and also got a trailer towbar fitted at the same time. The weather going up was horrid - a grey murk that resembled a London smog in many ways, except for the foul smell that used to accompany those. It took longer than expected to fit the towbar but when I left, everything seemed fine until about halfway through the journey home when I noticed that my Garmin 2820 stopped working. Being suspicious of this and feeling that it must have a cause related to the recent fiddling with the bike's electrics, I pulled into a lay-by and discovered that my trailer lights had also stopped working. I called Alan Young at Freewheel who made some helpful suggestions including an offer to put me up for the night if I wanted to return to Norfolk. However, being closer to home, I decided to get home, using hand signals in place of my trailer lights and sort the problem out there.

This morning, the cause of my lights failure turned out to be a simple fuse. The extra lights (in addition to those installed in the panniers, plus satnav plus CB radio were just too much for the 5 amp fuse safeguarding the accessory terminal. After debating with myself the wisdom of installing a 10 amp fuse in place of the original 5 amp, I decided in the end to power the trailer relay directly from the battery using an in-line fuse for the trailer. This seems to be fine, at least for the moment although I may have to check battery condition more regularly.

I am pleased with the trailer. It looks good and the Bordeaux red gel coat, whilst not a perfect match for the Cabernet red of my bike, is reasonably close and I certainly have no urge to get it sprayed to match exactly. The trailer is well shaped with plenty of storage for all the stuff I can imagine wanting on a camping trip plus a lot more besides. I am really looking forward to using it for the first time.

Before my return journey, I was a bit nervous about towing the trailer, never having done this on a bike before. I am happy to say that I really didn't notice it was there unless I looked in my mirrors for it. I actually did this quite a bit at first to check the turning circle as I went around corners. Cornering presented no problems, I didn't have to take them especially wide at all.

8000 mile service and new tyres

On the Goldwing that is. I bought it just a year ago when I started this blog and it has performed beautifully during the time since then but I guess part of that is getting it serviced regularly and so I took it into Doble's yesterday for the scheduled service. I reckon a 4000 mile service interval is pretty horrendous in this day and age but subtracting the tyre costs left me with what I thought a reasonable bill for a major service.

8000 miles isn't a huge amount for a year's biking but to that I must add the mileage of my two foreign trips on other bikes (Patagonia 2700 miles, Italy at 1800 miles and a further 1000 miles for the GS) and we end up with a respectable total of 13,500 miles for the year. Not surprising that my woodwork has taken a back seat!

Italy 2008

Back from a marvellous tour of Umbria, Tuscany and the Marche courtesy of Beach''s Motorcycle Adventures.

I was riding a brand new BMW 1200GS equipped with a Garmin 276C GPS (great system - miles better than my Garmin 2820 I reckon, at least for my uses) that was filled every couple of days with lots of routes all well researched by Rob Beach. He has found wonderful motorcycling roads, twisty, scenic and if you want them dirt roads. Umbria was spectacular - rugged scenery, mountains with snow and at times cold winds, as I found out when my brand new bike succumbed to an "immobiliser incident" at the top of a pass. The bike had to be transported to a dealers some 60 miles away so for a couple of days I rode a BMW F 800 ST - showing the value of the kind of back up provided by Rob - also the wisdom of using a simple old-fashioned bike if one wants to do a RTW trip!

A few pics

It was particularly nice to be with my friends from the Patagonian trip - Brian and Shira, even Mr Happy made it!

More photos are here.