Riders:
Gareth Morgan- BMW GS800
Joanne Morgan – Suzuki DR650
Coming from NZ it’s hard to envisage that you could do this with ease, but Europe is altogether different and when you set yourself the goal of riding as many mountain roads as the snow conditions will allow, you inevitably are criss-crossing over Passes that form the borders between countries. So for us to go […]
Into the Alps this time – French, Swiss, Italian, Austrian –it’s all the same range just carved up by national borders. Unfortunately for us we’re a bit early in the season to be able to ride the passes here – unlike in the Pyrenees, they are still all closed for winter. If we’d been here […]
The snow capped roads of the Pyrenees provided somewhat of a challenge to our heavily laden bikes, but steady-as-she-goes kept us all upright – even though it was every bit as cold as the Brass Monkey can be back home that we normally do if we’re in NZ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJD9DTBTOXM&feature=youtu.be
It’s not just the corkscrew, the switchbacks, the stone walled one way stretches that make riding along the Pyranees fun – it’s the tunnels that we seem to be in and out of all day. You start to love them. I guess there’ll be a hell of a lot more of them once we hit […]
Mountain roads, always a favourite for motorcycling – and we have the Pyrenees, French and Swiss Alps in quick succession, so by the time we leave Western Europe our mountain fix should be satisfied. Starting on the West coast of Northern Spain and exiting Spain via Andorra into France has given us a great combination […]
Already on the European mainland we realise how cosmic the roading system is compared to ours in NZ. We most often have “Avoid Toll Roads”, “Avoid Highways” enabled on our GPS’s so as to keep our ride to the back country and small villages. But often these roads criss-cross over and below the fast roads […]
New Zealand and Spain have about the same per person income, Portugal’s is roughly three quarters of ours. But the regional disparities are significant. 1. The Alentjo Billed as Portugal’s largest but poorest region, this region of Portugal that’s south of Lisbon reminds us very much of those areas abandoned by progress – left with […]
Iberia is a mere 8 miles across the water from Morocco and yet as we ride across it and read about it, we find it’s another region with a long and surprising history – in this case from over 1.2 million years of inhabitation when Homus Erectus walked these lands. It is hard to think […]
Well no, we’re not in Bavaria, but sadly it’s been a Black Forest day in Portugal for us. Remember the news items in June and October 2017 that told us about these massive forest fires in Portugal and Spain that were fanned by hurricane winds and which killed more 100 people – 45 of them […]
