Longest Day Up

I leave the wheel on what's becoming an increasingly warm day and head to find a petrol station and some lunch. Judging by the pre 1900's buildings Falkirk must have been a prosperous place in it's heyday, but it's certainly suffered in recent years. There are signs of investment though such as the wheel and the next site to visit. I fill the bike up at Tescos petrol station and push it out of the way so another car can get into the pump whilst I'm browsing the meal "deals". Spicy chicken pasta and pickled onion Monster Much if I remember rightly. The lady at the till couldn't understand how another car had filled up before I'd paid for the fuel and I really struggled to decipher her accent, but I just kept smiling and waving my credit card around. The racket of the blowing exhaust as I left the forecourt had a dozen pairs of eyes locked upon me, all thinking idiot . At least I presume it was because of the exhaust... Five miles ...

The ship I've been intermittently working on for the past few years has a lot of Scottish people onboard who had given me plenty of advice upon places to see in that there Haggistan. Eilean Donan Castle was one that I wanted to have a nose at but was a bit too far out of my way. The first and last of the three places I visited today were from suggestions, the middle one was my must see. During the 1850's, for some reason or another the Victorians fell in love with the story of William Wallace. Enough that in 1861 they started building a monument to him on the Abbey Craig, a hilltop overlooking Stirling and a pebbles throw from the university. After a rather nice breakfast in the halls I rode to the visitor centre where they have lockers to pop your bike textiles in whilst there and the nice lady in the gift shop looked after my lid as it wouldn't quite fit. I walked up the hill and climbed the 67 metre high gothic styled monument to a chap who undoubtedly l...

  Not long after the group photo people started to disperse in ones and twos. I stayed around to chat to a few others but with most people having a long way to travel I left them to it and started heading south myself. It was a strange feeling being back on the bike, despite it only being six hours since I'd parked it up. I had thoughts of visiting either Duncansby Head to the East or Thurso to the West, but the former would have been down some tiny tracks and the later was half an hour out of my way and with no surf to tickle the reef there wouldn't have been much to see. I headed slowly to Wick and filled up the bike, nodding to two other LDU'ers as they did the same. With a full tank I started to bimble towards Inverness along the coast road but soon found myself riding with a little more enthusiasm than necessary. Somewhere along the A9 I saw a sign for a cemetery with a commonwealth war grave overlooking the sea so I sto...

From pitstop five at Haggis Tours to the quayside at John o'Groats it's 119 miles. There's a petrol station just after we leave P5 in the middle of Inverness and it would almost be impossible to get the navigation wrong to the very far north easterly point of mainland Great Britain. I'm pretty certain that this leg will be one of the hardest though. Nick and I bid farewell to everyone at the final pitstop just after half past two on Thursday morning. After brimming the tanks we headed out of Inverness, over the Kessock Bridge which I remembered well from the cycle ride a decade ago, just as it was starting to get lighter again. Half an hour later and there are signs for Nigg Energy Park where I've joined and left countless ships over the years I've worked offshore. Looking down on the Cromarty Firth I try to see if there are any ships I recognise tied up alongside but it seems quiet. We keep pushing on, Nick's bike struggles on the steeper hills but he's...

The ferry crossing took about twenty minutes so just before half nine we were being waved up the slipway at Dunoon ahead of most of the cars. As it would be a long run to Inverness and with concerns about availability of fuel at Fort William we trundled along the waterfront to the BP garage to top up our tanks and for both Nick and I to fill up our spare cans too. I wasn't going to risk putting the cheap petrol into the bike as the Chinese carb diaphragms I'd bought are known to split when faced with too much ethanol, so I waited patiently for the chap with the Yamaha to finish refuelling and use the one pump that was selling Super Unleaded. As it happened I was idly watching Nick as he didn't properly deploy his Honda's side stand and ended up keeling right over on the deck with a loud bang.  It took me half a second to register what I'd just seen, then I ran over to him and lifted the bike from where it was trapping his left leg on the floor. Th...

Onwards, onwards. Always pushing north. Leaving Preston at 3pm I'd been on the go for eleven hours and covered 436 miles, but I wasn't half way yet and unfortunately I was well aware of that. The scenery between Exeter and Preston had rarely been exciting, the odd pretty building aside. To keep me from getting too bored I sung to myself over the sound of the engine. With no natural talent or even a vague ability to carry tune in a bag it's probably for the best I'm inside a helmet. My bike had started to make suspiciously loud noises since Liverpool so helpfully it drowns out the racket I'm making. It's funny what will set you off, a shop window displaying the words Want More? has me singing(ish) Freed From Desire . A fish sticker on the back of a car that's doing 40 in a 60* has me yelling Take Me To The Church Of The KLF . I know less than half the words to the songs I sing, but if anything it just encourages me. I've got rhythm though, stacks of the s...

Sometimes, with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight it's obvious where the seeds of your own downfall were planted. Whilst some of the problems that I experienced wouldn't exactly be considered a downfall per se , they certainly stopped me from getting into bed an hour or two earlier, and at four in the morning that certainly feels like a rapid descent from height... Leaving the Prees Heath services I know the next leg is going to be short in distance but also the most awkward one in terms of navigation. Getting to Liverpool I assumed would be easy enough, getting out the other side shouldn't be too difficult, no? If I have any problems I'll just follow the ample road signs. Hopefully... A few weeks before we set off JM had published the final route instructions. One of the other riders very kindly took all of the instructions, plotted them into a navigation system and made six route files which I and many others then downloaded. My little Beeline nav device gives you an arr...

3am and the alarm goes off, a drum and bass cover of a Manu Chao song and wildly inappropriate for this time of the morning. I'm not sure how much I've slept but it's time to get on with it. Shower, coffee and food, then outside to get ready. It's drizzling and everyone is grinning but also there's the odd worried look when faces are turned away, it's quite a monumental task we're about to do and very few of us have attempted it before. Rain will make or break us today, and after the weeks of wall to wall sunshine the last few days of water from the sky has been as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit... Strap the tiny amount of luggage onto the bike, check the fuel can is secure then throw a leg over the ringing wet seat that'll be my perch for an unknown number of hours. It fires up at first stab of the starter with just a pinch of choke for which I say a very rapid if unorthodox prayer. Dead on 4 o'clock I file out of the car-park in the not quite dar...

Just before 3pm I set off from my house for Lands End. We don't actually do the complete end to end as Lands End don't open their gates until 9am and there's no accommodation there for forty riders and the necessary support crew. So we assemble at Lands End for 4pm and have a ceremonial start off. When I left my village it was raining hard enough, and had been for a couple of hours, to flood the patio so despite the heat I wrapped myself in all my waterproof gear. Three miles to Redruth and the roads are dry and the sun shining. Yay for Cornwall... An hour and 34 miles later and I wasn't the last to arrive at the meeting point at Lands End where we first get to meet the others and look at the very broad spread of bikes that'll be aiming to ride to the very North East of Great Britain tomorrow. There were a few absolute heaps, and a fair few bikes that you'd also suspect could be sold today for much more than the nominal £600. There's also some poor chap who...

So I made it, 993 miles in a shade over 24 hours.   I wrote this on my forum as an initial thought, I'll either edit it later and write more or just write a whole new post but I'll leave this up for a bit: I think I got to JoG about 0430h in the end, but I shepherded one chap back from about Glen Coe onwards. He'd tipped off his bike at Dunoon snapping his clutch perch and getting a mirror stalk in his eye. I didn't want to leave him, especially as his tank range was pretty small on an old Honda CB360. He suddenly disappeared a number of times from my mirrors so I had to go back and see if he was ok and could get the bike started. 993 miles was my final total. I was soooo cold though, the chap at P5 who owns Haggis Adventures very kindly lent me thermal liners for my jacket and trousers which helped so much, and his wife had made little doggy bags including scones and a miniature bottle of Glenmorangie for arrival at JoG. I gave her a hug as I left and thought we were b...

After some more last minute bike repairs/modifications, getting together luggage, some spare fuel capacity and quite a bit of admin including pace notes. I'm ready. For a given level of ready. Obviously... This morning has been a bit of a panic*, I ended up stripping out the wiring that I'd done yesterday for the axillary lights. I'd firstly wired them in using a relay, then when that failed to work properly I wired them in directly, but with the switch on the negative wire back to the battery, and of course both lights grounded themselves to the chassis and were permanently on. Third times a charm and they're now wired in correctly but also it's only on the handlebar mounted switch, not off ignition so there's a possibility I could flatten the battery. I have no idea how the reg/rec and generator will deal with them either so I may just have manufactured a whole world of electrical pain for myself but here we are... Months ago I bought a plastic welding kit wit...

The goo that was in the thermostat is evidently all through the cooling system and although it's had a good flush out, it is probably blocking many of the galleries in the radiator. Touching the middle of the radiator when the bike is running and it feels cool, you can leave your hand on it whilst the two tanks either side are boiling. Removing the radiator and filling up one tank slowly then you notice that all but the bottom two galleries are completely blocked. Water isn't getting exposed to cool air as it crosses the radiator, so it just re-enters the engine as hot as it came out. Best way of getting scale out of something is with Harpic. You can use bicarbonate of soda, or white vinegar and gently boiling or something but I was running out of time, we are away camping over the weekend and I needed it done now. For three hours I had Harpic inside that radiator, shaking it and refilling it and trying to get it to cross the galleries. It's made a mess of the stainless sin...

Thursday evening, five days to the start of the LDU. After posting on the LDU WhatsApp group one of the other of this years challengers Dave, who co-owns the Redruth MoT Centre (the premier MoT garage in the Redruth/Pool/Cambourne area) suggested I visit the next day so we can pull apart the cooling system and see what's going on. I very gratefully accept and happily ride up there then next morning. We take the bike apart, remove the radiator and thermostat. The radiator does allow water to pass through at a decent-ish flow rate, but you can see there is scale inside and many of the fins are caked in mud and other road debris. The thermostat however is covered in this weird goo that seems to be made partly from silicone sealant, partly from sand and partly from bits of scale. Boiling it in a mug of water doesn't make it open either so it's obviously borked which will cause the overheating.   Getting to the thermostat was a challenge and required prising the twenty year...

So it's Friday, four days before I run out of time and I'm stood there looking at the bike in the afternoon sun dumping it's coolant out onto the road again. The fan is running madly but the temperature gauge is obstinately refusing to drop back down whilst more and more water splatter my shoes. Annoyingly I'd just spent four hours working on the bike to make sure this didn't happen. This is A Problem.  Rewind back a day and I trundle up to Plymouth and back, a round trip of just over 120 miles to say hello to some friends, make sure the bike is running well and nothing falls off. The first thing I notice is that even before I've got to Liskard a half hour up the road that the seat is really uncomfortable. As in a wooden plank with steel rivets in would be preferable to this. The second, and slightly more concerning right now, is that the temperature gauge is permanently just below the redline. It's been that way for the past ten minutes and every so often d...

If I had three wishes I'd wish for five, Then I could breath under water and I'd still be alive.* Or alternatively, I'd get this lot: A radiator cap with only a slight bit of manky oil residue on. Means the head gasket is fine (probably) and residual bit of oil is swimming around the coolant system rather than a leak anywhere. The bike is fit and healthy(ish). Which means it's time for this: And not long after I handed over the keys this arrived: I gave Adam, the MoT tester a hug because I was quite emotional. Not sure he was expecting it mind. Whilst waiting for the MoT I met someone else waiting for their test to be complete on a tasty looking Z1000, the naked with the twin shotgun pipes. He is a similar age to me and had had leukaemia in his early 30's. I genuinely enjoyed listening to his outlook on life and speaking to him about attitudes to work and life. We're here for a good time, not a long time, But we should make the best of it when we can and be kind...

Since the last post I've managed to ride the bike on a few chores around the lanes and then up to Redruth, over to Helston and back home again. Not far but there's 55 miles on the trip meter since I filled up the tank. The bike's running well, it easily pulls up to 70mph on the A30 and ticks along merrily at that speed. No idea if it's able to go faster Officer... Nothing has fallen off so far although than the number plate had started to think about a bid for freedom. It stops and steers with if not aplomb and taught manners then at least it's not so bad that I've ploughed it into a hedge yet. Always a reassuring sign. The brakes are still terrible, the suspension wallows like one of Chacewater Farms prize sows and it's still loud even with the baffles in. But so far, so good. So the only outstanding issue is the head gasket. Sooner or later I'm going to have to take off the radiator cap and see if there's loads of congealed oil entering the cooling...