Today is the last day of March and it's proper April weather here. A mix of sunshine, rain and blustery wind. Its lovely weather for walking in - really blows the cobwebs out the the head and gives you hope for a lovely summer to come.
Its not the best weather though for riding a scooter. The rain I might be able to cope with but I really dont like the blustery wind - it tends to leap out at you and catch you unawares and makes you swerve all over the road. I find this sort of riding very tiring. When we first started talking about this trip, we were in the middle of winter and the vision of taking a sunny spring scootering sabatical was distant and compelling. Now we are here, the reality is that the weather is not necessarily as lovely as we thought it might be. We had a glorious week last week - and that bought hope and excitement, but this week its not looking so good. And so with reluctance I dashed out this morning to an Army and Surplus store to buy an all-in-one waterproof suit. It looks a little 'industrial', but at £15 I cant complain and I hope to never have to wear it.
While I was there, I got a text message from Scott;
"Have been fretting over Holland route. Any ideas?"
He made me think. Ideas? I hadn't even thought about route plans yet. I was kind of thinking we'd work it out as we went along. However, Scott had got me worrying a little so Ive just had a quick look at google maps.
Of course Ive looked at the rough plan before. Hook of Holland, dead early in the morning to Dusseldorf dead late in the evening. Its about 3 inches on the map. Easy, but I thought it might be a good idea to get a bit more specific. Hmm - those are busy towns - they will take some concentration and care. I typed into google maps some specific addresses, selected to avoid highways and tolls, and viewed their suggested route
View Larger Map
164 miles. We have approximately 10 hours available to us to make this journey so my intuition is that it should be a breeze..... however, the nagging grown-up in me made me get my calculator out - just to check. Bearing in mind that this leg of the journey will be the first for both of us on scooters on the wrong side of the road, AND the first time we will have ridden together (I'm not sure what added complications or benefits this might bring) - At an average of 25 mph, this journey is going to take us 7 hours. Which means we will have 3 hours of slack for essential things like coffee / pee / warm-up / petrol breaks AND the inevitable getting lost AND heaven forbid, repairs and maintenance.
This leg of the journey is going to test us
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