Obsession
November 10, 2007 at 8:15 pm | Bike, Trip | 1 comment
It consumes my every waking hour, trivialising what’s in front of me and turning tortuous the daily monotony of work.
I read every scrap of travel writing I can find, Striking Viking’s ADVRider.com Thread, Jupiter’s Travels.
Amazingly enough Ewan Mcgregor’s “Long Way Down” started a few weeks after I’d made my decision to do this trip by bike, so I’ve been keeping an eye on that as well; and although it’s quite far removed from the unsupported adventures of less famous riders, it’s quite interesting nonetheless.
Vital for entertaining me at work in a job that started boring me more than two years ago to the extent that I actually found another job!
Though I was inticed back with a significant salary increase.
I’ve been stressing about two major pieces of equipment for my journey, my bike and my camera.
I don’t think it really matters which bike I get out of the choices I’ve narrowed it down to.
Namely a Honda Transalp (current frontrunner as some-one at work’s selling a cheap low-mileage example), a Honda Africa Twin or a BMW GS650.
All of these bikes will do what I require, I simply have to find one that’s in good condition.
I want to find one soon, but I have to sell my car first to raise the cash, as although I have plenty of money in the bank, I want to preserve the sancitity of it as long as possible, as through previous experience I’ve learned that “I’ll just borrow this little bit of money from my savings for the time being” quickly turns into “Fuck! I haven’t got any savings!”.
This will dissapoint my girlfriend somewhat, as since she doesn’t drive we’ll have to either walk, taxi or pushbike everywhere once I sell my car (that and she doesn’t want me to get a bike anyway as she reckons I’ll kill myself).
But unfortunately from here on in my girlfriends wants have to start to take a little bit of a back seat.
It makes me feel cruel, as she’s kind enough to late me stay with her until the day I leave for Italy.
I am helping her though, she’s under-educated to the extent that she’s not strictly independant and this has lead her to depend on a string of abusive boyfriends.
Trying to resolve this requires a… certain amount of patience, but is rewarding nonetheless.
She does hamper my planning and personal activities somewhat, as if I’m not paying attention to her she sulks with the traditional “What’s wrong?” “Nothing!” but with the most transparent body language you’ve ever seen.
However the poor girl hasn’t had much go right in her life and is the sweetest thing you’ve ever met.
I went to see a BMW F650GS today, 3 hour drive to and from and the blasted thing didn’t start first time, so I have grave reservations about it, plus the 5% the salesman was prepared to knock off the asking price didn’t impress me much.
Inspecting it was a brief glimpse into how far I am out of my depth, I know almost nothing about bikes, and being outside of my zone of knowledge trying to blag it ended up with me rushing the inspection, I don’t think I really learned anything about the condition of it bar my baseless opinion that the sprockets seemed a little rounded and the identification of a rather dodgy looking wire outside the fairing.
As if we needed another reason to steer clear of valets everywhere, a report from The Herald Sun claims that a casino in Australia has handed over an F430 to someone other than the owner. This week, professional poker player Van Marcus stopped into the Crown Casino with some friends for a little recreation. Adam Ramsey was there at the same time, though when it came time to leave, Ramsey approached the valet stand claiming that he had lost his ticket. The guy points to the drop-head Ferrari F430 in the parking lot and says it’s his. The valet crew asks the gentleman to fill out a form with his personal information, which he does, and hands him the keys to the Prancing Horse.