Your Ride

What happens if the motorail service due to whisk your bike down to Italy goes bust? You ride there instead. This all began with a planning exercise based on a promise to my wife that our bike tour would be simple and relaxed, a reaction to a very cold and wet ride down the Route…

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Embarking on a 120-ish mile jaunt around Wiltshire — with Salisbury Plain, stone circles and tanks carrying L-plates. I love chalk. Not the school blackboard variety, but the landscapes produced by this great swathe of ancient limestone that sweeps right across southern England. Find the right A and B roads, and you’ll be sharing these…

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Himalayan passes by Enfield Bullet – landslides, altitude sickness and not a lot of road. This ride was the hardest, most fantastic and rewarding thing I have ever done. Twenty-one riders on 16 bikes left Vashisht, a hill village in Himachal Pradesh, north India. There were three couples (I admired the pillion wives for their…

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This month, a UK Mid Ride, around the coast of Britain by Triumphs – what could possibly go wrong? Father and son, two weeks’ holiday in June, a brace of Triumphs (Street Triple and Bonneville) – what else could we do but a mega-ride around the UK (anti-clockwise)? We’d hug the shore as much as…

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Two day rides in one trip – Dumfries and Galloway up to Kintyre plus Glencoe. Sometimes the best bike trips are those where you pretty much go on the spur of the moment. Finding I had a spare day or two, I dug out the map, looked for roads marked as scenic and chose a…

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Looking for adventure in their own back yard, 27 strangers ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats. It started as an open invitation to anyone interested in riding from Land’s End to John o’Groats. I was going to do it the slow way on the same 105cc Honda CT110 that I’d ridden from Sydney to…

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Is it riding a big adventure bike off road a realistic prospect, or is it just manufacturers’ marketing spin? We headed out to Wales to find out… Some days are better than others. The one at the Yamaha Ténéré Experience in mid-Wales has to go down as one of the better ones, as I was…

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Alex Carnegie rode a Kawasaki Versys 650 around the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand. This is his story… For most people, riding in New Zealand would mean a two-week tour, or perhaps an organised adventure, but because our trips down under are to visit our daughter and her family, holiday biking is usually limited to…

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Forty years ago, Steve Pighills toured the Eastern Alps by Triumph Spitfire – this time he rode an MT-07. When you pass 70 it’s a good policy to concentrate on doing things, rather than finding a justification for lethargy. In my case, it was the excuse for exploring the Eastern Alps – Austria, Slovenia and…

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