My first bike trip ever

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iamgigglz

Grey Hound
WD Supporter
Joined
Oct 6, 2011
Messages
5,621
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Location
North Yorkshire
Bike
KTM 990 Adventure
I stumbled across these pics and thought they deserved to be shared. This was the trip that got me completely hooked on bikes.
I'll keep the words to a minimum. There aren't many pictures, and we only realised after the trip that the one camera had black & white film it it.

There was very little planning involved; I found a place close to Frankfort advertised as having a 4x4 track and camping grounds, and was less than 250 scenic kilometres from home. Perfect! We organised gear, not thinking about how it was going to fit on the bikes, and waited for the weekend to arrive.

Somehow we had it in our heads that "burning out" our exhausts was a good thing. To this day I'm still not sure if it is. We did it anyway, supposedly getting rid of the 2-stroke oil build-up and helping the soon to be abused bikes breathe easier.

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Early that Friday morning, we changed the oil, lubed the chains, gathered as many bottles of 2T oil as possible, attacked every moving part with Q20, and packed the bikes. We ended up loading up the carriers with as much as we could, and the rest went in our school back-packs.

We were off.

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We stuck on the N3 for as long as we dared, peeling off at Heidelberg and heading down past the Vaal Dam wall, stopping at some small town for lunch (can't remember where). Yup, it had taken us five hours to do 120km. We only had a top speed of 80, and even then the bikes kept overheating, forcing us to stop for 15 minutes every 30km, plus we had a little rain which slowed us even more.

<img src="https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/185_10050096910_8879_n.jpg"/>

We pushed on to our destination, only another 100km. We pulled in to Frankfort, where the local police were riding around on exactly the same bikes as mine. Cars kept pulling out of my way...
At the local Spar we bought the biggest steak we could find, and the only liquor they would sell us; d00s-wyn.
We arrived at the camping spot just before sunset, pitched camp, demolished the steak (no veg), flattened the sauvignon blanc, and fell into the tent. Even though it was October, we absolutely FROZE that night.

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Next morning we were greeted by a heavy mist. Pretty cool.

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Then we hit the 4x4 track...well, if that's a 4x4 track then I'm Santa himself. We just barely managed to get through on our bikes! The water & mud was crazy, and the inclines and declines had us on one wheel more often than not.

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One of my favourite pics of all time.
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Pictures never do an incline (or decline in this case) any justice!
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Another drunken slumber, an ice-cold hide-behind-tractors-to-keep-warm ride home, and the best biking weekend ever was over.

We lost our map two thirds of the way there, we carried zero spares, the cell phone gave up on Saturday morning, and we ran out of fuel money exactly one tank's distance from home.
It could have gone so horribly wrong, but it didn't, and that's what made it awesome.
 
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