There is nothing like a good days riding to clear your head, so I figured that five or six would do the job even better. The excuse, should I need one, was the Ural dealers meeting in Linz, Austria. Its always a pleasure to meet old friends and the prospect of meeting Rick Clark, the new CEO of Ural worldwide, and hearing his plans made the trip compulsory.
Its been a good and enjoyable season for MotoPro, peppered with many new friends and good days out and marred only by a stupid (no, I wasn’t riding!) accident which left me with aching ribs and a ban on laughing and sneezing for the second half of the year, but now is when we come to what I always see as the hardest bit of my job - deciding what bikes to put on the fleet for next year.
Fresh air was obviously required so I decided to ride up through the Swiss lakes and see which of the alpine passes was still open. Although I had on almost every item of winter riding gear I own the moment that the sun went down just after Interlaken signalled the end of the road for me. I had chosen the Brunig-pass as the prettiest (and least snowy) but the clouds were low and the lights in the pretty little chalet-style hotel said ‘eat me, drink me, sleep me’ just loud enough.
I have been humming and hesitating all year about the biggest bikes, those of over 1000cc as, whilst many of you who are used to the long straight roads of the US go for these guys automatically, most of our guests end up on the midsize bikes like the Triumph Bonnevilles by the end of the week.
To my mind even this 2000 mile trip, taking in 5 countries in 4 riding days was easier on the torquey Honda Deauville than on the much heavier BWM RTs. Honda named the Deauville after the seaside town 200 kilometres out of Paris that is considered the perfect days riding distance away. Their aim was to build a bike which would let you enjoy the fast and sometimes twisty roads to get there whilst traveling comfortably two-up and with a weekends luggage. The 2008 model has been upgraded and given a bigger engine to allow you to always feel you have a little more left to play with.
Driving the next day up through the Swiss lakes, Germany and into upper Austria left me feeling ever more alive - surely inspiration would come this way! Its a fact that when riding you often don’t truly realise you’ve changed countries until you stop and open a restaurant menu, and there’s no better way of confusing the taste buds than a Swiss breakfast, German lunch and Austrian supper. Ural had booked us all into the Marriott in Linz so a good English/Austrian/American cooked breakfast finalised the disorientation.
The long ride home was to be taken at a leisurely pace, with a meeting in Milan craftily planned to coincide with the Milan bike show forcing me (quite willingly) to fill a day on the way. I chose Verona, mainly because it was again going dark as I came off the bottom end of the Brenner pass, having spent the day marvelling at the clouds hugging the hillsides making them look like they had all just come steaming out of a very large oven. Sunshine always makes the ride more fun and I have to report good weather everywhere except Austria, but then that’s why they serve hot red wine, isn’t it?
Sitting in the Piazza Erbe in Verona (as I am as I write this, a large glass of Valpolicella by my side) is a perfect place to think about the fleet again. The 1150s have been with us for two seasons now and normally I would be changing them out for new. But, and its a big but, there are several good reasons for keeping them on for one more season - firstly they are going so well and after twenty thousand miles they are, like a BMW should be, properly run-in and rolling way better than they did when new - why give that pleasure to some other guy by selling them? Then there’s the replacement cost and the huge increase in insurance and maintenance with the new 1200s which therefore will cost way more to rent. So whats the answer? As always, keep both! I am going to put the 1200RT on but at a price competitive with the other rental companies here and keep the 1150s but at a lower price; that way we all get the benefit.
The Milan bike show was just incredible, huge halls full of stands sit two storeys high - 12 major halls full of motorcycles. A huge amount of self-discipline was needed to get everything out of the show and as always little was found - we wandered about gawping and adding everything to our shopping lists before collapsing on the Ural stand where business was as brisk as usual.
Our final day was a good blast back from Milan to St. Remy so we got the rainy Alps out of the way with a blast through the tunnels (the high passes looked just a little too cold!) and took a quick lunch in Briancon, just back into France.
Whenever you want to get a new route out of a favourite area just ask the GPS, it will always find a different and obscure way home, frequently taking in someones back yard, but always interesting. This time it didn’t let us down and brought forth a new gorge and some nice back roads between Sisteron and Sault that will definitely be a new route by next year.
