Early preparation
It’s been 10 months since our last long trip on a motorcycle, but we’ll get a chance to get back into the swing of things in a couple of weeks’ time when we go to the National AGM of the Ulysses Club which is being held in Mildura, about 900 km away. It will give us some practice in packing our gear into one pannier each. While we’ll only be away for a week, we shall need just as many clothes etc. as we’ll be carrying for 7 weeks in Europe. The luggage space on the different bikes is about the same, so it will be a realistic test.

I’m reasonably ride fit as I do at least 35,000 to 45,000 km each year on my bikes and two weekends ago I accompanied a friend on a 1600 km in 24 hours Iron Butt Ride. We managed to do 1666 km in about 22 hours, so my backside is well and truly broken in. We’ll be doing about 7,000 km in Europe so it should be an easy ride, with time for lots of touristy stuff, though the terrain will be very different.

We’ve had a lot of rain here recently. Our place was isolated by floodwaters for a day last week and a landslide 10 km out of the village has cut the main road out for at least a month, which will affect our route to Mildura.

Now it’s raining heavily again. Not the weather for motorcycling at the moment. Hopefully the roads to Mildura will be free of flooding at the time we go.