Chinese New Year. A time when one of the planet’s largest communities celebrates with their families and friends. A time for reflection, fireworks, food and good times. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting…
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Watch as we crate our BMW R1150GSs ready for air freight to Kuala Lumpur.
Sydney was a significant stop over for me as my wife Sophie is currently living in Darlinghurst on tour with ‘The Sound of Music’ and I was keen to spend some quality time with her, we are also lucky to have some good friends living up here and what better way to spend Australia Day than on Coogee Beach with a beer and JJJ hottest 100 in 28 degree sun. Dad and my brother Tim flew out to Melbourne late Australia day and I have never seen my dad so happy to be swimming in the ocean. So that left us with both our partners and Ryan to spend the next 3 days roaming Sydney’s haunts. James and I spent a frustrating day trying to obtain final gear needed for the bikes and luggage in particular a top box for me as I had left Melbourne without one due to a lost key! I ended up organising one in Brisbane to pick-up passing through enabling me to spend the final day with Soph.
It’s only taken us a week to get this up and running but now you can keep tabs on where we’re at! Click on “Where are the Blokes” in the menu anytime to see where we are within the last 10 minutes. Hopefully this’ll help our mother’s sleep at night!
Well, it was an eventful start to the trip – I took a phone call from a police officer on the way to bike up my bike from the bar we’d had drinks the night before
“Mr. Ashton?”
It seems pretty surreal – there’s less than a week before we hit the road! And after doing some serious mechanical work to the bikes last weekend we thought we’d better jump on the bikes and test the waters whilst there’s still time to make changes; firstly to see how all the gear we intend to carry packs onto the bikes, and secondly (and probably more importantly) to see how the bikes run after all the work that’s been done to them.
We’re really excited to announce that we’ve been sponsored by Remedia Farmaceutica and the Five Plus Art Gallery. We’re eternally grateful to Valentin Tarus and the teams from both organisations for helping to make our dream a reality. We can’t wait for our arrival in Europe when we can drop in and say a heartfelt “G’day” to those involved.
Both James and I are taking our 12+ year old BMW 1150gs’s with us, each with well over 100,000kms on the clock. Although well maintained I’m sure many other Adventure riders would consider them too much of a risk for such a journey. I purchased my beast over 5 years ago replacing a Ducati 750 Monster; I was sick of getting to the end of the asphalt with the only option to turn around and head back to the big smoke. I didn’t want a glamour machine like my monster anymore and my budget at the time could only just stretch for an 1150GS. Rough around the edges but with a good heart it made it from Brisbane to Melbourne easily and with a fresh set of rubber I started to get to know the big beast. It didn’t take long to realise just how well these bikes handled and I’m still convinced that I can outride the Monster on it. I fitted the remus cat eliminator and muffler to get a note and some extra torque down low.
The clutch started to slip about 10,000km’s into my ownership and I fitted a new clutch kit and slave cylinder. Being a vehicle mechanic I have completed all the repairs myself; the is clutch is a big job but not hard. I was surprised to find the set-up and clutch plate location on the input shaft was somewhat questionable. The new clutch plate fitted the input shaft well and we all agreed that with new splines on the plate it should be serviceable for a while yet.
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