MooN

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

the XJ 900 was a superbe machine Lone, I could ride it all day in comfort and did a fair bit of 2 up touring with Mme Moon too ( alsace, Italy, switzerland, UK etc) I had the 650 first and then got my hands on the 900. in 5 years from '96 to 2001 i wound it up from 22000km when I bought it to 96000km when I sold it..never have I done so many km's anually as in that period and it never, never let me down, not once. ?

gotta keep the colons amused ain't ya ?

when i was first over here and bought a Yam xj900 i organised, twice, a run to the uk for a bike rally. once to the Suffolk Coasters Coypu rally and once to the Icini mcc 's "arse in the grass" rally. both obviously on the east coast. In those days you could still ride at silly speeds on the French autoroutes and get away with it. the first trip I organised, i gave the instructions that we'd ride the 30 k to Chalon sur saone, pick up the A6 nothbound and ride together at around 140km/h. Well we rode together as far as Chalon but once on the autoroute they all "poured the sauce" as no one says, ever... and despite keeping up a steady 170km/h I didn't see the front of the group again untill we got on the ferry at calais... that would have been in '95 or '96 I guess Won't happen again, those speeds today will see you in prison, no licence and no bike.

Allo Allo... welcome in

welcome from Moon, also known as...erm... Moon... yes it's a nickname but that's what i'm known as in real life too, and was before the internet ever existed. Adventure is, much like life itself, what you make of it depending on abilities bith physical and mental, circumstances and budget. For some people nuying the latest gear and bike and riding down the highway to starbucks, is in itself an adventure, others will need to ride the world in extreme conditions to fell thay've lived an adventure. I do my thing and try not to judgemental. most o the peeps on here "do their own thing" and their own way but we all ride.

National holiday here. Just happens to fall on my day off too so I didn4t actually have to work it and managed to get out for a ride in the afternoon. it went something like this I have been wanting for some time to go and look at a castle / fort pair that I noticed from the autoroute a while back. Having no real reference point it took me a while to locate themusing google maps and google earth and sort of triangulating from the autoroute, guessing distances. I found them on the "Butte de Thill", about 70km south east of here as the crow flies. I managed to turn that into a 200k round trip though... round a bend... the centre section: translation: " Here, 25th nay 1944, Hitlers babarians tortured and massacred 25 young resistants of the group "Henri de Bourgogne". They gave their lives that France might live" the stone wings to right and left of the centre lists their names and nicknames ( or possibly codenames) much time was spent dodging these, they are all flat out at the moment I had to stop and watch the lemmings for 5 minutes... all heading back to their parisien kennels after the long weekend...

don't even go there Bob, doing the handover involves a whole rituel of protocols that will make the handover take about 2 hours I reckon, this saturday we have 8 to do. punters arrive from 2pm, there are 2 of us ablr to do complete handovers... I have suggested to the directors that they need to organise some extra hours in the day cos 4 handovers each, at 2 hours a peice starting at 2 means we'll finish at around 10pm... except that the locks shut at 7...

picked up a load of frog and belgian bookings out of nowhere and plenty brits too now they're allowed out of their cage. if there's a significant "2nd wave" and re-lockdown then we're fucked, but otherwise should survive, with a bit of hard graft, blood sweat and tears...( not to mention wailing and gnashing of teeth! )

bloody nightmare Pete. this zeekend is going to be complete anarchy, I hope it will settle down a bit after that, but i'm not going to get much time off till october now.

Sorry, running around like a headless chicken at the moment trying to do 3 months work in 8 days, so working 6 1/2 days a week the last 2 weeks so no riding other than to work and back, and even then i finished at gone 9 last night. I had to get out, at least for an afternoon or I was going to kill someone... A couple of pics from the afternoon

I have to agree with you there Pete, though the dutch are probably a close second.... I never admit to being english unless I have to.

Welcome Phil, looks like you know some of the locals already ( possibly not the most recommendable though...??)

yup. the bloke that used to own the company that supplies a lot of marine parts for inland waterways boats in europe, was an officianado of these machines and a rabid specialist in all things Austin or BMC ( we used to have a load of old BMC tempest engines in our boats) he's had these two for at least 25 years, if not more and he'd planned to do them up once he retired... usual story, though he's restored engines and old cars all his life for other people, he just never got round to doing these two into one for himself, he's still there, but too old to do anything with them. Shame really cos his son has taken on the business but is not a fanatic like his dad and will never do anything with them.

on a run around picking up some bits for work by bike on wednesday I came across these to old ladies in the back yard of one of our suppliers Austin FX3! London taxis built by BMC from '48 to '58 WTF? made me instantly think of that war poet Rupert Brook (?) who wrote in the 1st war I think " If I should die, think only this of me, that ther is, some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. There shall be, in that rich earth a richer dust concealed..." I can't remember how the rest goes, you;ll have to look it up. it must be a good 30 years since a learned it at school...