life has it’s surprises and in a way boys will remain boys, they jus love playing with their toys. This week-end Michael and myself decided to go and play, not in at the beach, not in a bar or a sports hall but in the mud.
On our BMW GS bikes we decided to make a little stroll around the farmers roads in Brabant (a province in Belgium). Fully equipped with our bikes with renewed tires (for the knowledgeable ones amongst us i was fitted with Conti TKC 80 tyres because my beloved Dunlop has not yet managed to deliver knobbed tyres for the BMW, but living on hope).
with the weather being wonderfully sunny but freezing cold it already announced to be a tricky ride. The sun was defrosting the top layer of the unpaved roads we selected creating a very slippery mud on top of a stone hard frozen under layer. You can image that our bike riding looked more like ice skating than riding. Consequence of this all was: slippery slides. First one was me to go down with a broker gearshift as result and a broken ego of off road champ. But i was not alone for a long time, soon after my slide Michael went off the track into the fields.
Lifting heavy bikes like outs gave us the muscle training for at least two year. Once we found our easy on the slippery tracks we only got into problems when Michael rear brake blocked and caused a little fire :-) .. but by removing the brake we continued our journey …
But in the later afternoon we took a track to far .. with the sun having defrosted most of the track giving us a muddy clay that was as sticky as toffee pudding to our wheels it became apparent we got more and more stuck into the last track.
we had to turn back in little stages. Every 5 meters we had to get off the bike because the rear and front wheel blocked due to an excess of mud between the tyre and the front protector. After struggling for one hour Michael decided to get help after he got completely stuck and gave me a mud shower
however i refused to give up and finally managed to get myself out of the rather awaked situation, restoring my pride as off road champion :-) whilst Michael had to loose his pride to a farmer girl having to pull him out.
but today we are licking our wounds but are very proud of what we have achieved. Now we are planning for a new trip under better weather circumstances.
From my side I'm planning also my trip to Istanbul end of May, beginning of June. If anybody wants to join: more than welcome
happy travels
Toon
