 At last, our bike has been collected and will soon be on a boat to Melbourne, it should land around 16th Jan. It needs to get to Sydney, so will go by road for that last leg and hopefully our friends Richard & Jude can get it through customs easily enough. We fly out via Hong Kong and should arrive in Sydney in plenty of time to start our trip on the 1st Feb. We will have a week in Sydney and hope to get in a few ride-outs from there to make sure everything still works and to acclimatise the best we can – there will be quite a difference in temperature between winter in North Wales and the height of summer in Australia! If anyone thinks our bike looks overloaded, we have all our riding gear, including boots strapped on there and our helmets in the top box. We actually came in well under BMW’s recommended max weight, including us in riding gear, clothes and camping gear – result! It also includes up to 16 litres (so 16Kg) of water if we fill the bladders we have packed. Our garage looks empty now without the bike, but it will give me a chance to have a good tidy up. Our dog is called Woody and one of the hardest things about this trip for us will be being without him for 6 months.
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 Following on from our earlier post showing our bike with the PVC pipes installed for our Australia to Wales adventure, we had lots of much appreciated comments and questions about what we are taking and suggestions as to what to take and what not to take, (some made us smile which is a good thing), all of which we have considered, apart from taking a car, so I thought I would share what we are taking and how we arrived at it but also how we evaluated the weight and volume constraints which may answer some of the questions and suggestions posed by the group. We have learnt that everybody’s packing philosophy, and ultimately their packing list, will be different as it depends on where you are going, how long for, what bike you are on and other considerations like are you going off-road, do you have a passenger and what accommodation are you planning to stay in. Our 2up Packing list on a big GSA will be very different from a single rider on a DR650 going offroad. It’s all too easy to say “put in on a table and take half” Half a tent and sleeping bag and a pair of undies does not fly. The result should be a pragmatic decision considering all constraints and goals and how it will affect your trip. The evaluation, I got a bit carried away with this, and the packing list I created is a bit too long to put in a post so I have put it up on our website for people to download. Hopefully it might be useful, even to validate a differing opinion you might have. https://www.2upfromdownunder.com/our-gear.html  This might be a strange addition to a GS Adventure but not for me and I’m not an ex Harley rider, I’m a 60 year old getting my bike ready to ride halfway around the world. I have had these pegs fitted on the standard bars and the Outback ones I have fitted for the trip and I wouldn’t be without them now. I don’t actually rest my feet on them, they are positioned so I can rest the back of my boots on them. I have a bad right knee and struggle to keep my leg in one position for too long and these pegs allow me to stretch out now and again. You can’t ride like that at speed but you can in any slower sections or roadworks if you live in the UK! These pegs are made in the US by Ilium and I probably wouldn’t recommend them because of their price here in the UK. There are cheaper options out there but these suited me as they fold in really neatly, have a nice wide rubber pad and swivel horizontally when out to suit the angle of my legs. You might ask what are you doing riding such a big, heavy bike (2 up, with camping gear) with a dodgy knee in the first place! A fair question. I don’t have a problem with my knee in most circumstances and regularly ride enduros and green lanes all day here in Wales, it is just the near 90°angle when you’re riding over long distances that causes the problem and that’s even with regular stops.  I was looking for an additional storage solution to the BMW panniers that we have on the bike. We need to carry fuel bottles for the camping stove / spare fuel bottles for the bike along with our drinking water bottles.
We did a test ride a few months ago and we were not happy in storing these items inside the panniers as some of the bottles leaked. I wanted to store these items outside and looked at various products out there. In the end I chose to use a very Aussie solution: DIY PVC drainage pipe containers! They seem to do the job. They are light, watertight, dust tight and cheap. I can also store different items in them as well as fuel/water bottles. No doubt they are not to everybody’s taste but we quite like them. It’s a challenge to pack a bike for a long trip with a pillion and camping. Two times the gear and half the space. We have to keep the weight and volume to a minimum.  Lobo and I had a great day at the Off Road Skills centre near Swansea in South Wales with Simon Pavey and his fantastic team - https://www.offroadskills.com/
Lobo has already completed courses 1, 2 & 3 that cover actually riding the GSs properly off road but this was my first visit and this was for the Adventure Maintenance course, something we felt would be very worthwhile for our upcoming trip riding from Sydney back home to Wales (North). Up until now, Lobo was like most BMW owners took our 1250 GSA to the local dealer to be serviced, as much for the ‘stamp in the book’ as anything else and that is perfectly understandable. The Adventure Maintenance course was designed by Simon and is intended to give you the confidence and skills to carry out emergency repairs to get you back on the road, it isn’t a substitute for taking your bike for an annual service. We were practicing on 750 & 1250 GSs but the course would give you the confidence to work on any make of bike, we had Suzuki and Triumph owners in the workshop with us. So what did we cover: what tools to carry, fixing punctures, changing tyres, jump starting, replacing brake pads, dealing with the aftermath of a water crossing if all goes wrong! The course covers so much more than this and Sam and James (a trained BMW technician) are happy to answer any questions you might have for them. This is not about studying the theory in a classroom, this is about being ‘hands on’ in the workshop – we have watched many Youtube films but there is absolutely no substitute for wielding those spanners yourself! Puncture repairs and tyre changes were of particular interest to us as we can’t exactly call the AA if we get a puncture crossing the Nullarbor Plain in Australia! Would we recommend this course or a course like this wherever you are in the world? The Adventure Maintenance course is primarily aimed at those planning a big adventure but we would say that it would be of use to anyone who rides a motorbike, whether you’re heading up to Scotland for a week or half way around the world as we are, so the answer is an emphatic yes. A big thank you to Simon and Linley for the opportunity. |