MooN

that's one of the reasons I 'm going on this "big trailie" specific off road course Pete, I'm happy enough on these easy trails with the Tiger but I find myself looking at other trails and thinking " i would have tried that on the tralp" so I'm hoping this will give me either more confidence with this bike or some handling tips as it's a very different beast.

very little time for riding in august and the one or two short trips I did to blow away the cobwebs were tight timewise so rarely stopped for pics. here's what I did get

nice pics Pedro. What camera are you using? the pics are really sharp.

s'funny I was going to say just that...

Bonjour...

only Winnie the pooh fans will get that one... Just popped in to say that I'm not dead yet, just been flat out at work, the French have taken to heart the idea that holidaying in France is neccessary this year so they have, massively, but for the French "holiday" means July or August, nut June and not september, so we have been at running at full capacity from 10th July to end August (which though excellent is not going to make up for the other 6 months of running at either 0 or 5 %... ) with just myself and the company owner working rather than him, me and 3 techniciens. needless to say I have nearly as many hours overtime owed as I have holiday still to take so It has been" work, eat, sleep, repeat" for the last month and a bit. It has now gone quiet again so I'll be back with more tales of derring do from Burgundy shortly, Starting on sunday when I will be attending an off road motorcycle training session with a professional instructor, given as a birthday present from Mme Moon. it's going to take me a while to catch up with everything on here but normal service will be resumed as soon as poss. ?

that's t'other sid eof the rive to where I was, but I clearly need to look into that GR. thay'r not all accessible by bike, the GR 13 I think goes through vermenton but you'd be a bloody clever rider to take a bike trough it, most walkers give up and switch to the road

I'm an asocial git at the best of times and and rarely so happy as when I'm alone. I do though, enjoy fom time to time riding in company, if the company is good. there is a small group of riders here ( we're no longer an official club) who I am sufficiantly comfortable with to simply be. I avoid big groups like the plague, just not my thing.

you should see some of the stoopid places I got to with the transalp... but it was lighter, less pwerful and specifically MUCH less expensive in case of damage...I'm still being careful with this one, and haven't mastered it off road yet ( I had the transalp for 17 years and 120 odd thousand km's...)

done plenty more silly stuff over the years with the tralp Fred, but still building confidence with the Tiger off road, I find the throttle over sensitive and dosing it is less evident thaan the old tralp ( there's also twice the hp to deal with) and it's heavier, but I'm getting there.

despite having read various members inane babbels and rambling misconceptions of what defines a "biker" or not and what constitutes an "adventure" or not, I think I might have found the definitive answer to the definition of "adventure" riding. credit where credit is due, I stole this from the H.U. faceburke page and thought it might amuse

dunno if it's a GR Bob, It was once the river towpath I think, but obviously fell into disuse and unmaintained about 80 years ago, I expect cyclists, fishermen and dog walkers keep it as it is now ( that's why I only explore like this on weekdays cos weekends would probably get confrontational, whereas today I saw no one...

managed to wrangle a couple of hours off this afternoon and as it was only 25 odd degrees rather than the 35 odd we had earlier in the week I went for a short ride to explore a trail I had started discovered but not explored along by the river a while ago. it starts with a poorly paved road down to the river north of Joigny and the trail proper starts here someone was water skiing on the river a bit of limbo dancing allowed us under this one but the trail was getting narrower and gnarlier I was beginning to wonder how wise it was to continue on, taking into account that i'm alone, running road tyres ( ok it's dry so that's not reeeely an issue, but still...) i have a fucked back, left shoulder and left knee... i don't know if I'm even still capable of picking tigger up if I drop her. well that answers that question, I don't think I can get under that one Nope definately not. I did think about how to do it but before tring I walked forward a few hunderd meters to see if the trail opened out further down or not, and came across this and no sign of widening now I know Fred would have had a saw with him to clear the path ( there's also a potentially live electric cable to deal with...) and Bob would have fitted under anyway but given my lack of ability and knowledge my only reasonable choice was a turnaround. "Oh Cock" you might be able to make out from the above pic that the path is not wide, there's the river on one side and a large ditch on the other. How the F am I going to turn Tigger round? I had a long hard think about this cos I couldn't aford to get it wrong and would only have one shot, and didn't want to risk my back or shoulder which are, (quite seriously for a moment) dangerously close to rupture. Jacket, tank bag helmet and gloves were hung on a tree and I pushed the bike back about a meter or so where the path was marginally wider and a tree growing outwards from the river bank lessened the chances of throwing the thing in the river. with some pushing and pulling I managed to more or less spin the bike on it's side stand ( took 3 or 4 goes as it kept sinking in the ground and had to be repositioned each time) and after not a little sweating and grunting we got turned around and i rode out to a wider grassy section having cooled down I had a plaisant bimble back to the road and tus home via an easy trail shortcut that i know and love, as a reward for not having drowned us both in the river, and having taught tigger how to spin on her sidestand, trick which I've seen but never tried before. a couple of hours out in all and about 20 km off road I guess.

nice pics fred, that cave is very square, manmade surely?

that's USS Hawkbill I think, famous as the devils submarine. pedantic mode "ON" technically it's a "sail" , not a conning tower... Pedantic mode "OFF" nice pics ?

Working all weekend.

Oh me too, i love roads like that, partly the shade of course...?

I'm surprised some enterprising ex govt official hasn't tried flogging the building to aome brits for 4 times what they're worth...

Great pics Bob, that church looks like middle ages, though possibly post renaissance ( 13th -14th century) or something like that. There's plenty older churches around in eastern england but don't know your area at all from that point of view. Thanks for the pics.

300 odd km around the Puisaye and Jovinien ( west and north of me) just put "300km" in the "loop" section of KURVIGER on the puter and let it generate a route. transferred direct to the "me-phone" for use tomorrow when the girls team will have left for a long weekend with mother in law. I then looked at the weather forcast and discovered that the forcast for tomorrow is 40 odd by midday so I dug out my phrase book and found the page marked " sod that for a game of soldiers" and abandoned the children for the afternoon today cos tomorrow I will be mostly lying flat on the tiles of the living room floor with all the windows shuttered! La Puisay, open countryside mostly arable and windfarms untill you get over the other side and start down towards the Loire when it becomes marshy and decidedly medieval something for the religious and for the historians ( s'funny that the french word for a fortified tower is Donjon, wheras the same word in English, "Dungeon" means the exact opposite of a tower...) I even managed to find a cooling splash for the tigers tyres...

Transalp. another one that refused to die...

yeah, i didn't explore it far enough so I'm going to have to go back, I'm not sure what the rules are for it as it's usually got a barrier across the entrance but it was open so I went along it for a handful of k's and then came back cos I needed to get home ( celebrating N01's driving licence and BAC results) it has some nasty bitumen speed bumps but avery single one of them has a packed earth earth "go around" an the grass at both sides...( typical french reaction to authority that? ) you can see the entrance to one just above the right edge of my wind screen in the pic. i'm going to google earth it and see where it goes, then go back and explore it further.

I thought huawei was taiwanese or korean, so that shows how much I know... I don't knowingly buy anything chinese but break off the outer wrappings and most electronic goods are built there. To be fair, the bubonic plague thing is a media hype I think, it reemerges regularly in various parts of the world and is now fairly easily treated and dealt with as I understand it. I don't subscribe to the conspiracy theories about covid or other deseases, but then I don't subscribe to any of the myriad conspiracy theories that circulate so readily on social media so maybe i'm just too naive and trusting. nothing I can do about any of it anyway so wether it's natural or done "a purpose" the result is the same.

hi jeff