Riding Through Spain

For England, we are having a lot of snow at the moment. It is cold. I saw a temperature of -11.5C the other day. Oddly this is almost the same amount in Fahrenheit -11.3F.

My red bike is stuck in Ireland, awaiting the weather to improve so it can be road tested after having some work done on it. The Leading Ladies are still stuck in Los Angeles (update to come later).

Having no bike and having weather that means I cannot ride anyway this is obviously the right time to think about..... a road trip!

I have decided that with a few friends, a ride across Spain is needed. Oh, the warm weather, the mountains, the twisty roads.... it should be terrific.

Here is the route in outline....

My friend Paul who rode with me for two weeks at the beginning of my USA tour has said yes to doing the ride. So has my pal Ian Solley of 7 Ages Custom Motorcycles. Martin and Joanna who I met when riding to Austria a couple of years ago are thinking about joining us. Jackie and the other non-riding partners with fly down and be there when we arrive.

We will get a ferry from Portsmouth to southern England to Santander in northern Spain and then ride on the eastern side of the country all the way to southern Spain, spend a few days at my house there before riding back through Spain on its western side. En route we will be staying in Paradores which are Spanish hotels in Castles, Palaces, Fortresses, Convents, Monasteries and other historic buildings.

I have mapped out the basic route and it looks like being over 2,000 miles.

Roll on summer!

The Leading Ladies are stuck in LA

How about this for bureaucratic nonsense!

It has been a few weeks since I delivered my bike, the “Leading Ladies” to the shipping agent in LA, so a few days ago I enquired about when the bike would be back in the UK. I was told by the shipping agent there is a problem as the US Customs people in LA wanted to see the original import paperwork before they are prepared to release the bike for shipping. However, the US Customs people in New York (where the bike was imported) don’t have any paperwork because they use a totally computer based system, so the NY Customs people cannot supply the paperwork that the LA Customs people want to see. It doesn’t exist.

After lots of going forward and backwards, the customs people in LA have refused to release the bike for export back to the UK until they have the paperwork that does not exist. The only way around this is for the bike to be re-imported into LA so a paper trail can be created and the one piece of paper that satisfies the LA customs people is available.

You would think that the US customs department used a common system across the country, or at least had different systems that respected each other, but no, it seems they just make up the rules locally. In the meantime, my bike still sits in LA until the two different customs teams and the shipper can sort this mess out.

To use a common UK phrase, what a load of bollocks!

Thousand Mile Photos

My regular readers will know that while I was on my tour, I stopped at every thousand miles point on my journey and took a photo looking forward. Most of the time, this meant just stopping, grabbing my point and shoot camera, jumping off my bike and taking a quick picture at the side of the road. I posted each of these, but this morning I collected them together to look at them all. Here they are....

29th June 2010. 1,000 mile point, near Ellsworth, in Maine....

7th July 2010. 2,000 mile point, in Charlestown, Rhode Island....

14th July 2010. 3,000 mile point, near Jeffersonville, in Vermont....

21st July 2010. 4,000 mile point, at Little Erie Beach in Angola, New York....

28th July 2010. 5,000 mile point, in central Milwaukee, Wisconsin....

3rd August 2010. 6,000 mile point, near Pipestone, Minnesota....

8th August 2010. 7,000 mile point, near Oelrichs, South Dakota....

14th August 2010. 8,000 mile point, in Gillette, Wyoming....

18th August 2010. 9,000 mile point, near the Beartooth Pass, Wyoming....

27th August 2010. 10,000 mile point, near Mirror Lake, Utah....

3rd September 2010. 11,000 mile point, at Grand Lake, Colorado....

13th September 2010. 12,000 mile point, near Wetmore, Colorado....

20th September 2010. 13,000 mile point, Dolores, Colorado....

25th September 2010. 14,000 miles point, Clifton, Arizona....

3rd October 2010. 15,000 mile point, Route 66 near Kingman, Arizona....

12th October 2010. 16,000 miles point, near Sedona, Arizona....

15th October 2010. 17,000 miles point, near Moab, Utah....

21st October 2010. 18,000 miles point, near Gunlock, Utah....

27th October 2010. 19,000 miles point, in Yosemite, California....

4th November 2010. 20,000 miles point, near San Simeon, California....

11th November 2010.  21,000 miles point in the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, California....

Adjusting Back to Life in the UK

Okay, so I have been back home for a couple of weeks now and I have been very busy. It seemed strange having to re-adjust to life back in the UK. Of course being back with Jackie was wonderful, but getting used to driving on the left side of the road has proved to be remarkably difficult! Soon after getting back, I went for a drive and found myself driving on the wrong side of the road!

The other thing that has been hard to adjust to is the weather. At the end of my tour, I had grown too accustomed to the warmth of California and the sudden lowering of temperatures, the snow and frosts has come as a shock to the system. Last week it snowed and this caused chaos as it usually does here. We are just not geared up in the UK for dealing with snow because it is pretty rare, so when it does snow, many things seem to grind to a halt. Wisely, the country does not spend a fortune preparing for snow, because to make a real difference we would need to invest a great amount of money to properly deal with the few days of snow we get. However, when the white stuff does fall, we are quick to complain that we are not equipped to deal with it. On the whole, I think we have got it just about right, but it can be frustrating when things like the road gritters we do have don’t get deployed in time to make a real difference. We should be better using what few resources we do have, but we don’t seem to be able to get that right.

As might be imagined, the list of things I need to look at after being away for four and a half months is considerable and I am still only part way through doing what needs to be done. I like things to be organised and I enjoy making lists. I now have a list of all of the things I need to do, but I spend too much time just looking at this list worrying about how long the list is. I tend to first tackle the easy, generally not so important things, simply because they are easy! I am having trouble getting back into getting things done.

I received some news this morning that despite being delivered 22 days ago, the Leading Ladies are still at the shipping agent in Los Angeles and not on a boat making their way back home as expected. It seems that the US Customs cannot find any record of my bike being imported into the New York, so they are saying it cannot be exported back to the UK until it is re-imported (on paper) once again to the US. Needless to say, I was not impressed, especially as I only heard of this problem today. I cannot quite believe what I have been told and I will be checking with the shipping agent every day from now on until I hear the bike is on its way back. The first thing I want to know is exactly how is the bike being stored and is it safe, covered and being properly protected?

I have been thinking a lot about the book. I haven’t fully decided, but it looks like each state I visited is likely to have its own chapter and I am pleased to have got the first of these, South Dakota, written. I deliberately chose one of the states I went to in the middle of my tour as the first I wrote as that is more typical and I wanted to see how it came out. My plan is to write about one state per week and as I went to 27 states, that will take me to the middle of next year to complete the book. This seems about right and I will try to keep to this as a target.

I seem to have lost the energy I had during the tour and I feel very lethargic at times since I have returned. I haven’t even wanted to walk the dog much but I put some of this down to the weather. About ten days ago, I did play Badminton for the first time in about 35 years and my shoulder still hasn’t recovered yet from the shock of been used in ways it is not used to. I want to continue playing each week, but until it gets better, my aching shoulder will prevent that.

Jackie and I have a place in Spain and we flew out there for a long weekend to make sure the house was okay. We hadn’t been there for over 6 months so it was good to see that everything to do with the house was alright. We did get delayed coming back due to the bad weather. I have been very lucky with flights for the past few years and I had forgotten just how bad it is to have to wait 7 hours for a flight. We arrived home at 3am this morning. Groan!

Tomorrow I am having lunch with my pal Ian Solley of 7 Ages Custom Motorcycles. Ian has recently completed building another custom bike, a cafe racer, so I am looking forward to hearing about that. I did travel into London last week for the lunch, only to realise when at the restaurant that I was a week early! It seems my organisation skills have gone down the pan while I have been away!

Well, it didn’t take me long after being back home to start to think about my next long-ish bike ride, which I have decided will be across Spain. Well, from the top of Spain to the south and then back again to be more precise. I have invited a few friends to join me in the ride which will take place next July. I will post more on that ride as the plans become more fixed, but it looks like it will be for two weeks and hopefully will cover many of the great Spanish mountain roads.

Being pretty busy has meant I haven’t posted anything for a while, nor have I had the time to read other blogs, both of which is very remiss of me. I feel bad about not keeping up with other blogs, but to be honest, I have needed a rest from blogging for a few weeks. I still have one more post to prepare from the tour and I must get around to that soon. In the meantime I am wondering if I need to start a new blog where I can write about my biking, or whether to keep posting on this existing “USA Tour on a Harley-Davidson” blog. There are pro’s and con’s of each way....

Must dash - I need to go and look again at my long list of things to do....

New York, New York.

After delivering my bike to the shipping agent in Los Angeles, I flew to New York for an overnight stop. I had decided to stay right in the middle of Manhattan, at Times Square.

I had arranged to meet fellow blogger George F who writes an excellent blog called Riding the USA. George is from New Jersey and he did an 8900 mile trip across the US in 22 days earlier this year. George very kindly met me at my hotel for the night and after dumping my bags in my room, we headed straight out for dinner. Well, sort of. We actually headed straight out for a long chat about riding bikes across the US and we had dinner at the same time. It was one of those occasions when the waitress had to keep coming back to our table to ask if we were ready to order, because the two of us we talking so much!

Having both ridden from coast to coast, we had a lot in common and a lot to talk about. Bikes, places we went to, people we met etc. We ate in a Cuban restaurant called Havana Central, just off Times Square and the food, drinks and company was very good indeed. I have never eaten Cuban food before and I liked it.

Afterwards we stepped into Times Square for a few photos before George had to go get his train home. It was a real pleasure meeting George (and I hope you get that Yamaha you are after soon!).

Here is George in Times Square....

I went and retrieved my big camera so I could try some night shots of Times Square. It is so much better taking pictures with a camera that you can control exposure and shutter speed than with a point and shoot.

This is the main part of Times Square. The building in the middle is where the ball drops to mark the new year....

There is a lit red staircase in the square – I am not sure what it is for, for it is great to photograph....

One of the street vendors in the square....

As I went back into the hotel and rode up in the glass elevator, I still had my camera out with the fisheye lens on, so as I went up, I snapped a few pictures. This is the best one....

The next day, I only had a few hours before needing to go to the airport to fly home. I wanted to take some pictures of NYC but I wasn’t sure where places are and I don’t know my way around New York very well, so I did a very tourist thing and used taxi’s to get around!

9/11 had a momentous impact on New York and indeed the whole of America. A great deal of the rest of the world followed along as events unfolded on that dreadful day, so it was fitting that I sought out ground zero and to have a look at the new building work taking place there....

The New York Stock Exchange, in the Wall Street area....

One of my favourite buildings in New York, the Flat Iron building....

Radio City Music Hall...

I have been to New York a few times, but I had never before been to the top of the Rockefeller Center to look at the view. I am glad I did, as it was terrific. This is looking north....

Central Park....

Looking south with the Empire State Building in the middle and looking towards the Statue of Liberty....

I have seen many canyons on my tour, but not many of the man-made variety....

Times Square during the day....

Grand Central Station....

I then rushed back to my hotel, finished packing, caught a cab to the airport and flew home! I slept most of the way.... zzzzz

Funny Signs

Despite the fact that my tour of the USA is over, I still have a few more posts to do about it.

As I was riding through the US, I occasionally saw a road a road sign that make me smile or laugh. I would often take a photo of these and I have been saving these until the end of my tour so I could post them on my blog all at once.

I hope that you enjoy some of these....

I am sure that like me, you will have a favourite.

This one just had me laughing out loud....

We all know somebody who might live on this road....

I wouldn’t want to live here....

What? They get their own crossing?....

OK, but what ARE the special rules?....

This sign had me wondering for hours....Appropriate Precautions?.... What are they?....

There is no need to cuss....

We suggest you let them cross, or they might not like you....

There are a lot of Moose here then?....

What a great name for a road....

I will go get my swimming trunks....

Not in July they won’t....

What irresponsible doctor that did this....

I thought they only lived in cities...

Okay, but did you really need to put a sign up outside her house?....

Meant only for hogs with babies....

This one just had me roaring with laughter....

Some people just have jobs that are impossibly difficult....

A popular place with young men....

You have got to be kidding me. World famous?.....

Does that have lots of bends or strong winds?.....

No dinosaurs beyond this point....

This one just cracked me up. I still don’t understand it....

A fantastic sign, because it meant lots of tight bends coming up....

Seen on an Indian Reservation....

This must be a physicians sign....

Many rivers are....

I wish....

I thought Holland was bigger than that....

Well, the police might be down here, but I'm not sure....

A huge strange sign, presumably put up be someone who felt very strongly about this....

No especially funny, but it made me laugh....

No way! You cannot call toilets a “Comfort Station”.....

Isn’t is better to park first?.....

The person that put this here was certainly making a point....

What a unlikely combination. I bet people are rushing to here....

Not a funny sign, but my least favourite of the whole journey....

I would hate to be here during a storm....

What a nightmare it would be to live on this street....

How on earth did this get its name?....

It’s not strictly a sign, but on seeing this, I just had to get a glimpse of the driver....

Finally, my absolute favourite sign.
Ever.
This is brilliant....

I hope some of these made you smile!