Countdown to Mountain Madness
16 07 09 - 16:22 Some time tomorrow afternoon I'll be leaving Derby and riding the ZXR400 down to Portsmouth, from where I will board a ferry which will deposit me in Ouistreham (Caen), on the coast of Brittany, at about 5am on Saturday. By Saturday evening I will hopefully find myself enjoying the hospitality of Dave and Kate Haines, of Lot Valley Enduro, in the vicinity of Cahors. Early on Monday morning I'll be leaving, with Dave, a couple of other reprobates from the Performance Bikes Forum and a van full of bikes, and heading for the town of La Molina in the Spanish Pyrenees, where we will be competing in the Horizons Unlimited Mountain Madness.The What?
The 'HUMM' is a two-day, navigation/scatter rally organised by the folks at motorcycle travel website Horizons Unlimited. The principle is simple - you get a map with a number of waypoints, and you visit as many as possible in whatever order you consider best The team that visits the most waypoints in the allotted time wins. There are actually two events, on- and off-road. We're entered in the latter, despite my complete lack of any off-road experience. It can't be that difficult can it?
Preparation
My preparation for this trip has been the usual shambles. I'd planned on taking the DR800 for the ride down - hence the recent addition of hard luggage. Then at the start of last week it ate one of the gearbox input shaft bearings (probably, final diagnosis will come when I get time to pull the engine out and split the cases). With the clutch slipping and all manner of nasty clonking noises coming from the gearbox I decided against embarking on a 1600 mile round trip on it and demoted it to sitting in a corner of the garage.
That leaves me with the ZXR400. Some might shy away from the idea of doing big miles on a 400cc sports bike with a 'compact' riding position, but it's perfectly possible, and I did 2700 miles on it in a fortnight last year - a third of that distance being covered in the final two days of the trip. The only obstacle in the path of this plan was that I blew a fork seal some time during my last trackday. Replacing the seal is one of those jobs that ought to be pretty easy, but if you really need to get it done something is bound to go wrong. And so it was - in stripping the fork down last Sunday I managed to damage the bushes, and of course I didn't have new ones - not having planned on replacing them. A Monday morning phonecall to Cradley Kawasaki led to a set of bushes landing on my desk yesterday afternoon, but yesterday evening, with less than 48 hours to departure, the ZXR still looked like this:
Fortunately, the fork went back together relatively easily, and the bike is now as close to 'full working order' as a 16 year old, thoroughly abused bike gets.
Of course at the time of writing I still haven't packed, or worked out what route I will take once I roll off the ferry into France. What else is the last night before departure for?
Doing it for Charidee
As if to balance out the ridiculous idea of letting a bunch of incompetents loose on his bikes, Dave also came up with the commendable idea of trying to raise a bit of money for Riders for Health while we're at it.
We have a donation page at www.justgiving.com/thehumm2009, and at the time of writing our total stands at £590.00. If you can spare a few quid then please do - you will be helping RfH to carry out their work, and will spur us on to even greater acts of stupidity next week, which will be documented here for your amusement. Everyone's a winner.
Stay tuned
Although my luggage capacity is obviously somewhat contrained by taking the ZXR rather than the DR with big metal boxes on either side, I'll be taking the camera, and will do my best to squash the laptop in as well so I can take advantage of the hotel's internet connection to post evidence of the inevitable carnage.
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