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My feet didn't touch the floor on either side, I have never had that with any bike before. Some grown ups had to hold me vertical till I pulled away and then after I had gone round in a big circle I was like a kiddie on his first 2 wheeled bicycle calling out to everyone to catch me when I stopped.

You can see @Six30 is keeping a eye on me!.

Those lambs are getting a bit of cock by the looks of it.

A 600-700cc single in trail-bike form is the perfect bike for me. Enough ooomph to get you down the road but light enough to pick up when you toss it down the trail........... All hail the mighty Donkey

Sounds like my general bike life

It was a sight to see, I had to burn the seat afterwards.

I guess you;d call that bus a Double Dicker now eh what?

Here it is …

Whoo hoo im in the projected cone of probability of being WIPED OFF THE PLANET!!! Bread and milk, i need bread and milk like...now.

Maybe it's because you don't take my picture taking tips, or buy ugly/chinese bikes?

he's about 6 ft gay

One more month (ish) and no double jabbed person will have to isolate. Not that that helps you now. So good luck. The lateral flow tests are incredibly unreliable though, if youve been eating or drinking before you do it it can easily give a false positive, fingers crossed

i got far to much style for stripes and shit .... you know this .

I read the ‘unread’ sections title and last comment as- Buck in Spandex I can remenber a pic of you on it, you made it look like a toy. How tall are you ? All I can say is the images of Boboneleg and Buckster together that appeared the minds eye may have scarred me for life

Test yourself every 2/3 days Fred, if you're still negative then you're good to go

Fucking great just had a message off the lad i've been working with all week saying he's failed two DIY covid lateral flow tests, said he's going to have a proper test tomorrow. I've just done a test myself and its negative

Yeh, with a Tiger tail on the end!

A bit of storm eh @Tym......suppose you will send the remnants of it our way!.

If he won't play on the lycra front, let's see a photo when he had a real bike. The KTM640 ADV

Liar ya pining for it.

I must be getting old, I actually quite like that................

There's a guy up in the North-East who has imported five from Canada, 2019 and 2020 models. He is asking £7,400 for them (on the road price), if it was nearer to £6,500 I'd be on my way to collect one . Me and my mate (Sarge) have looked into importing a few times but it's cost prohibitive at the moment , if we could find someone in the States to store 5 of them for us for a year and fit used speedos so they look like a second-hand bike then it would be worth it as then the tax implications would be far less.

yeh if you could , park the van right in front of it so we cant see the thing thats in the photo now

That's too much fuss for me. In Portugal we're spoiled and used to taking good expresso for granted. You walk down a city street, pop into a cafe, enjoy a shot of good (actually good) expresso without even sitting down for 0,60 to 1,00€ depending on location, and walk on having spent one minute in the cafe. I couldn't be bothered with all that in the middle of a bike ride. I might get a really small container like @bobonelegand see how it works in order to be really hipster and have a coffee on top of a mountain with nobody else around. Might as well take a rum flask and have some añejo, if it's winter ... Having said that, I have a fond memory of when I was in Brazil when I was 19 and stayed for a month in a small three or four room inn in Tibau do Sul, a small village in the northwest. As I was about to go out to meet my girl and her friends after dinner the guy next door invited me for coffee as he was about to have some outside so I stayed. He was a traveling salesman selling whatever all accross southern america, and brewing coffee was his night ritual. He roasted the beans with a small torch in a metal sheet, then ground them and then boiled it in an open container, no machine or press or nothing, just waited for the coffee to settle and poured the clean liquid on top. That is my favourite coffee ever, just the smell left from the roasting is better than drinking some of the modern stuff. Took him long enough to brew that cup of coffee, too!

No it just had that much power I put on because I was fed up picking the wife off the floor.

Not a great deal of words today as I'm going all Pedro-like. I went to have a look at some new (to me) Droves on the Somerset levels today. On the way I dropped down over Burledge Hill where there is evidence of some great lane management.......... Up over the Mendips and down through Wells, Glastonbury and Street to get to Somerton and onto the fun stuff. You get miles of this..............

I had never shared a pool with a seagull before. Although it looks summery, that is 50 meters high on a oceanside cliff, the wind was quite strong and not very warm at all. Took a walk before dinner, and you can see the wind on the water below

I thought this was one of Bob's holiday snaps, but it's the wrong way round.

A bit further on and it started to get a bit sticky, there is no gravel surface under this grass, it is pure peat and with the amount of rain we had yesterday it was slicker than a Beavers back end. The fun bit is trying to guess where the tractor ruts are under the grass so that you don't tip over in them............. After heaving my way though my thermostat started reaching boiling point so some clothing was removed and I made it back to terra firma. I carried on to do some more Droves which were pretty uneventful and then came to the North Drain. The North Drain does exactly what it says on the tin in that it drains the water off the Levels, there was a big shoal of Roach basking in the sun........... I started to head north now and back towards home, here you can see Nyland Hill (an extinct volcano) in the forground and the Mendip Hills in the distance as viewed from the Levels.......... Once I got up on the Mendips I stopped near Priddy at a convinient tree stump to sit on for lunch........... I had a quick look at a campsite (for future reference) and then made my way home. There will be some bike washing to be done tomorrow.

I have been planning a couple of longer trips, 3 or 4 days, but am not sure anymore how many hours I can ride comfortably in a day having not done any longer trips since the problems with shoulder and now knees. So despite the weather forcast being shyte and our region being on yellow alert for storms I decided to see how long I could last. I had heard tell of a road near Reims that was once a race track, and the stands have been left intact along the side of the road. I saw it on the telly a couple of weeks ago so though I might go have a butchers: Reims, and most of the Champagne region is on the Marne river plain so is obiously strewn with cemeterys and memorials of the first war and the battle of the Marne ( i did a ride report from Chateau Thierry and the american cemeteries and monument a few years ago) so, this being kind of my pet subject, I had to visit this, the National Monument to the 1st battle of the Marne ( sept 1914, with the advancing Germans just 30 miles from Paris, Marechal Joffre ordered his retreating 6th army to turn around and attack. The BEF on his flank did the same 24hrs later and the german advance was stopped and 5 days later was in general retreat) a small British cemetery nearby I also rode past a huge French military cemetary and an Americain one also but it was pissing down with rain so I didn't stop. The weather cleared again and as the sun came out I found a lovely quiet spot to eat my sarnies, in a village called "Oyes" the whole time I sat there eating and reading my book, about half an hour I guess, not a single car came past...lovely! Moving on, I crossed the Seine at Romilly and found the old race circuit pit lane and stands at "Gueux" just west of Reims being a Sunday there were a few people about as it's obviously a meeting place for the local petrol heads the grandstand opposite I went on Into Reims for petrol and rode home stopping a number of time to shelter form the heavier rainstorms that came through, they don't last long but they drop a huge amount of water on you and you can go from dry road to 3 inches of standing water in under a minute, so I prefer to pull over and shelter for 5 or 10 minutes if the opportunity presents itself, as it did here in a derelict Service station which I had to document for @XTreme I did try the door but it was locked. all in all 450km and 7 hours including stops, I could probably do another hour or even 2 after a longer break so i'm pleased to find I can manage so long and can now plan accordingly.

Left Faro not having a clue where I would go next, half an hour into the ride I stopped for a while, having to make a couple of calls and send some emails, my office for my morning stuff, right after the twistiest nicest part of the N2 in southern Portugal. All you need is decent coverage and a laptop that doesn't crap out from all the vibration on the bike, my choice would have been for a cafe as I was a little needy of a coffee, but all my options so far had a few people around and I am trying to stay out of people's way. Can't really stand sitting in a cafe wearing a mask so I don't. I felt like riding back to the Alentejo, but temperatures are supposed to go into unpleasant levels, and I had just come from there, so instead headed west into the Atlantic, but via mountains and hills, a Algarve most tourists never see. I rode a mix of nice smooth roads you would be happy to take a fast sports bike on, mountain roads less smooth and more twisty, good gravel roads, and less good gravel roads Onto dirt: Someone must have been shot to death here, place looked grim with a british plated transit van half disassembled, I didn't stick around. The nice dirt road turned into a sort of dirt highway you could drive two TIR trailers side by side, some corrugations also made it unpleasant, didn't take pictures of that ugliness, and it was proper hot there too so didn't feel like stopping allowing my own dust to catch up. Then some nice enough roads through orange orchards, also no pictures, but then a nice dirt road near the Funcho dam. By 14:30 I was a bit hungry, climbed the Monchique serra, which I've posted about before, and had a cheese and tomato sandwich there Then, because the guy took forever to put a few slices of tomato and cheese inside some bread, and I didn't know where to go next, I took forever to leave. Decided on going to spend the night in a hotel I have wanted to stay in ever since the first time I visited Sagres as it overlooks the Sagres point from a similarly tall (50 meters) cliff. It's expensive but what the hell. Made quite good progress and enjoyed the bumpy roads coming here, brief stop by the Cape Saint Vincent lighthouse, my favourite building in Portugal: Didn´t hang around much as I really felt like a swim, plus I'll stop by a little tomorrow before going: The room is a disappointment, but the view as I'm posting this right now: Going for a walk on a cliffside, and dinner in a bit...

6’4”

I'm going to book myself in for a proper test over the weekend, I've had both jabs so only concerned about spreading it if i have a positive test on the weekend. I think i'll be off work next week if his test is positive tomorrow could really do without it

I fitted a higher seat and a weight appropriate rear spring.

I used to ride a 640 Adventure, I'm 5'8'' and I managed ok.

When I left school I was 5 feet 11 and 3/4 inches. I now seem to have lost those 3/4 of an inch and am at 5'11". This is also coincidentally Buckster's inside leg measurement.

Going to be a bit hot this weekend......so if I don't get out very early there's going to be problems. Have to scan the map and see what I can come up with!

When I used to drink coffee the Aeropress saved me from drinking all sorts of dire coffee. Met a guy a couple of weeks ago who takes a tiny stove and weeny chair with him and stops at any view he prefers to have his coffee. Sounds good to me. Maybe a small stove and an Aeropress might provide the balm? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aerobie-AeroPress-A80-Coffee-Maker/dp/B000GXZ2GS/ref=sr_1_4?adgrpid=104166745093&dchild=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIrvqY-6_U8QIVW-vtCh19UwWNEAAYASAAEgI5mfD_BwE&hvadid=448944890121&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9045656&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=7709846566093587436&hvtargid=kwd-301155172040&hydadcr=19143_1810891&keywords=aeropress+coffee+maker&qid=1625778263&sr=8-4

Same thing, even worse I nearly dropped my bike today when stopped looking at google maps and up my collar crawls a giant grasshopper very curious about my face

It was about 22c today, we don't get a lot of mosquitos around here, it was the horseflies that were trying to munch on me

Quite smart, though. if you use an ironing board for a seat nobody will complain about the range!

A driftway, a lovely wide lane with plenty of grass (for on the move snacking) to make your sheep, cattle, turkeys etc walk along, promising them a nice Christmas as they make their way to Smithfield Market. I did hear that the Norfolk drovers would dip the turkeys' feet in tar to protect them on the journey.

How hot is it over there? looks like a swamp to me, mud and grass and water just screams giant mosquitoes

Those puddles are all new to me Pete, a Drove is a 'way' where cattle and other livestock were driven to market in days gone by.

It looks like some 5 year old designed with his lego

Are you Dick or Head?

the history of the battle of the Marne is french history Bob, and no one wants to learn about battles the French won because it would oblige them to question their stereotypes. The Body stood up fine to this test, worked the following day with no more then normal aches and pains so it's looking good for a 3 or 4 day ride at the end of august... if we're not all in lock down again by then. I'm surprised you've heard of it Pedro, most people haven't and I certainly hadn't until recently. The old start / finish straight throigh the stands and it lane is now the D27 between Reims and Gueux.

At least you led in gently before you called him a dumb cunt.

Yes. Infection rates are rising but hospitalisation and deaths currently arent increasing at the same rate which is the key factor. Getting a mild illness that requires no intervention and causes no long term disability is the key.