Apparently OK on both counts!

So – After just about 9 months, my busted scapula and the associated nerve damage were obviously a lot worse than I ever imagined after my first few hospital trips. I fairly soon gave up on the NHS – it’s never done (been able to do) anything much beyond simple first aid for me in the last 15 years I have had occasion to visit. Fortunately, I am in a position to take myself private when the occasion warrants and my shoulder was certainly one of those occasions! I paid to see one of the most highly rated folk in the country and after lots of CT scans (I think I glow in the dark!) and several consultations, I learnt that basically, surgery was out (too fucked up to risk it!) so time and physiotherapy were the options.

Time of course has been the great healer (plus an attractive South African physiotherapist – who has been well trained in massage which albeit painful, worked wonders). So here I am 9 months later, able to ride a bike on the road, with perhaps 90% movement in my shoulder and strength that varies from 10% to 90% depending on what I ask it to do. Naturally that calls for a celebration, so I am off to the USA for a 4000 mile trip through the USA and Canada with my buddy Jed whom I met on the trip to Tierra del Fuego.

Stemming from my promise to lead some of the Knobblies crew along the Kent lanes, I have been investing a lot of time and money on maps and GPS stuff. (OK I am a gadget freak and I know a real man would look at the clouds, the sun and find his way anywhere but I need all the help I can get and I just love the neat stuff that’s available now. After toying with several ideas, I finally plumped for a Satmap Active10 GPS unit to use off-road. It’s the only one to display real OS maps on a screen that is of a decent size. You can plan routes and track your position on the screen just as if you were working with a paper map and it’s bloomin’ marvellous. You can program routes on the PC and retrieve tracks etc as with most units and this works perfectly with the included software – provided that you have a Windows PC. There is no Mac software for it yet but I find it works just fine with Windows running under VMware. It’s not a cheap unit and the maps are expensive, especially in the 25k series but it beats the Garmin offering hands down. Garmin Topo maps are crap in comparison and whilst one could happily navigate with the Satmap as one’s only aid, the Garmin requires a paper map to make sense of its screen presentation.

An ancillary purchase has been the Columbus V900 GPS data logger that can record umpteen million track points. I got this because it was very well reviewed and I was fed up with my regular GPS units (Tom Tom and Garmin Street Pilot 2820) losing data as they filled up. The Columbis is tiny and is small enough to fit in a breast pocket and remain quite unnoticeable.

I shall try to find time to write up my conclusions about this stuff properly and in more detail as I think they could be useful to someone and I did spend a lot f time and money on the hardware I have bought and the time taken to investigate what was available and useful. This weekend will be a good cgance to give the new purchases a workout and please don’t blame me for taking a bunch of OS paper maps that I also bought recently – I have always been a bit belt and braces when it comes to travel.

The service wasn’t especially cheap but it has turned the bike into a usable machine which it wasn’t really before and in my view it wasn’t just money well spent, it was vital.

Now to the plan – I am aiming to go to northern India and the Himalayas next year! SWMBO has kind of given me her blessing…

The trip will be aboard Royal Enfields – the best bike to have in India if you need repairs apparently. Best of all, buddies from my Patagonian adventure are also planning to come – should be a great trip.

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 4×4 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.

Our guides were all local to the area and knew the plains like the backs of their hands, including the ranges and when it`s safe to cross them!

The rain ensured we had some nice puddles to play in..

We also forded one river that was quite deep and I wondered if the panniers would lifet the rear of the bike high enough to reduce traction! Evidently not enough to prevent me getting through and the panniers stayed totally dry inside. However, the topbox was a different story. I had put a full bottle of water in it and all the bouncing around destroyed it and all the stuff I had really wanted to keep dry and had therefore carefully put in the topbox, was suddenly not so dry! A valuable learning experience. Another was the fact that a road atlas made with a spiral binding can become a loose collection of pages as the spiral unscrews when subjected to a lot of bouncing around!

It just happens to be blocked by a rather large tree root..

Turning six bikes round in a lane narrower than the bike is long necessitates some rather hard work..

It was a brilliant day, organised by Mike Wilson at South London BMW. Six brave souls, including Mike – bravest of all for looking after us! – took to the Surrey hills and encountered most kinds of terrain from loose rocks to deep pools. Here is Mike showing the rest of us wimps how to do it..

I only fell off once which is a great improvement on my last outing! I had taken some precautions such as removing my mirrors – this made me realise just how much I use them as I felt completely blind for a while – and taking some spanners and the Torx keys on sockets. As luck would have it, the only thing that was right was the spanner for the mirrors. I could have done with a couple of other things after my “little off” but naturally, they were at home in the garage..

The problem with stuff on the back seat, as I found out last time, is that in my riding suit and motocross boots, I can’t easily lift my leg high enough to clear the extra height – I am not Darcey Bussell! – still I think I can just about manage to clear the tool roll. This problem is of course much amplified when one can’t stand on a piece of level ground or is up to the knees in mud. Both these situations also preclude use of the sidestand and then the problem is compounded by having to keep the bike upright and by the time this becomes necessary, the bike weighs a ton because one is absolutely knackered. At least, I am knackered. This is partially due to my advancing years but mainly because I am out of condition and haven’t yet been back to the gym since my Italian trip – or if I am honest since Patagonia, apart from a few forays that didn’t translate into peak condition… Only those who have ridden off-road know how much hard work motorcycling can be!