July 2008 - Posts
Hamburg morning was pretty hot already when we started packing our stuff in the morning and while driving through the city we got really swetty in all our gears.
Our next stop was Copenhagen, Denmark and a hotel which was already familiar to me as I had been many times in there during my business trips to Copenhagen.
Only incident during the trip was a talk with a Danish police which stopped us because passing a car from the right. In Denmark - the police said - from this they normally tear driving license, but in our case this motorbike police did not do that and left us go just after talking to us! What a nice guy...
Also my rear wheel drive started keeping the same noise again as when arriving to Rota and I looked up an local BMW dealer in Copenhagen and drove my bike in there. After taking the rear wheel of and checking it, they did not really find any issue with it, which was pretty strange since it was keeping this same scratching noise... anyway, a bit safer to drive home.
For the evening we set our goal to have a dinner in the Mongolian Barbeque restaurant near the Town Hall Square. Excellent place.
Here's a route we took to Copenhagen:
Driving for this day was really short, only 400 kilometers.
From Amsterdam we set our goal to drive to Hamburg, not very long trip, just a short 500 kilometer drive.
We stopped few times and once we got to Germany side I started asking after BMW Motorrad services.
Got one address for a local dealer in Oldenburg where we headed to show my BMW K1200LT's issue with hydraulic center stand, it was not working after driving if temperature was over 27 Celsius. On this shop they had not came across this kind of issue and due to our schedules they guided us directly to BMW Bremen.
In here they had seen this kind of issues couple of times and message was that the whole center stand hydraulic system needs a change. It's build is such that it cannot be repaired. I thanked very helpful stuff (we got even cold drinks while waiting) in there and we got back to road and to Hamburg, where I called BMW dealer in Finland to order the given part. Not just have wait for them to come back when the part has been delivered to Finland.
Whole day was really hot, in Hamburg it was 33 degrees and we arrived to the hotel in all our Gore-Text outfit...
Here's a route we drove:
Next stop will be in Copenhagen, in a known hotel where I have been staying during my business trips.
We started again a bit after 09:00 our driving day, long way ahead of us.
First 150 kilometers was really slow small roads running through villages, but eventually we got to a faster tracks and got the speed up.
We had no other destination marked in TomTom but Amsterdam, Holland and just needed to find a hotel in there with a working Internet connection.
When starting the day weather looked just fine, 19 degrees and eventually it got up to 31 degrees once we got out from France and entered Belgium. In Belgium we stopped once to fix our PMR phones.
We came to Amsterdam city center and drove around it twice looking after hotel with possible good parking spot for our bikes but after couple of trials on these center hotels found out that no Internet connection and parking was really hard we decided to get out of it. We found once hotel just outside which was full, but they gave another address to try and in there we got a room after small discussions since that hotel was full as well... Anyway, we got a room ~19:30 which was pretty late, we had been on the road for 11 hours.
Had quick meal, lamb ribs on the restaurant close by and went to sleep. End of day.
This was the route we took:
For next day we planned the stop to be in Hamburg, Germany. Not a big trip, just ~500 kilometers.
We started right after 09:00 from Angouleme after having breakfast at the hotel. Hotel stuff really excellent, guided us to good food places in the evening without even asking for it!
We drove a bit less than 600 kilometers on this third day, we should have been driving a bit more to drive through Normandy a bit more, but it started raining so we decided to skip two places and just drive to the hotel and see in the evening if we would do some sightseeing.
Rain was not that hard after all, we arrived at the hotel already before 17:00.
Here's a route we drove:
Roads were excellent on the way, few villages where speed was lower. When we started getting closer to Nantes, there were lot of people with their families, bikes and other holiday stuff on their cars and roads were really crowded. This did not really stop until just before Caen. Also between Nantes and Caen there were really few stop places where you could get gas as well, and on those that there were, they were really full of people.
Once we got to the hotel we found out that the advertised Internet connection was not really working and the hotel stuff was not really helpful on getting the connection working. This was really bad since we could not book the hotel in advance and have to just drive blindly to the next stop.
Our next stop will be Amsterdam, Holland, driving kilometers will be ~700.
Our second day started ~9:30 in the morning, this time we decided to skip T-skirt and shorts as driving out fit (yesterday we drove all the way from Rota ~900 kilometers in this outfit...).
We had good roads on the way, some traffic around Bordeaux -area, but once we cleared that everything went smoothly.
Weather was 20 degrees Celsius when when we left and at it's best it was 26 degrees. We almost also got rain when we arrived to Angouleme, France. We found excellent small hotel in here where hotel stuff was extremely helpful on finding our way to restaurant etc.
Here's a route we took on this day, ~600 kilometers drive:
Next day we should be driving almost 700 kilometers to city called Caen, France.
After getting our families to bus and on their way to the airport, we started our ride back to home ~09:00 local time in Rota. Our aim was to drive to city Burgos in Spain where we arrived ~19:00 as pretty much planned after driving ~900 kilometers.
Road was excellent on the way, mostly 120 km/h road, some road works on the way but we managed to keep good driving speed all the way.
Again, no toll roads.
Here's the route we took as recorded in TomTom:
For our second driving day we have ~600 kilometers to driving planned so pretty much nothing! We should spend next night in Angouleme, France.
Tomorrow we start our way back to Finland. Our families are flying with Finnair on tomorrow morning and we start also our driving ~08:30 once we have just packed everything again on our bikes.
Journey back should take no more than 9 driving days and this number also includes small issue with getting ferry from Stockholm to Turku so might be that if we are lucky we get ferry on time and be home 2-3 days earlier than planned.
Our route at this point looks like this:
Our first stop after leaving from Rota is bullet #6, city called Burgos, Spain. There we have our first hotel reserved. Driving for our first day is ~912 kilometers.
We have now spend lot of days here in Rota, Spain have been quite busy: lot of swimming, sun bathing some trips with our rental car, one longer one to Gibraltar where we planned to a trip last year but never made it.
I also had my bike fixed, it had two bearings broken in the rear which caused rear wheel to get in contact with a rear wheel drive outer shield.
I went to local BMW service in Puerto de Santa Maria at noon on Friday without any prior notice, got my bike in and after 15 minutes the result was that I had to leave my bike in there and took a taxi back to Rota. On Monday I headed back to see if the bike was already fixed (place was only 20 km away from our hotel) and in there it was just under final checks. After waiting for an hour I got my bike all fixed and even washed back.
Washing the bike was really the top thing as it was really dirty after all our driving:
When writing this it's already Sunday, next Thursday morning we should be heading back to Finland, but our route is pretty much unplanned at this moment. We have had some initial toughs on driving from Gibraltar to Nordkapp in 72 hours to get next Iron Butt Ride, but that is still to be seen if we are going to take that or not!
This day was just to get to the Jerez de la Frontera airport, wait for our families in there and drive to our hotel.
We did not even put our motorcycle outfit on, drove just with T-skirt and shorts.
Plane was 10 minutes ahead of schedule, we meet our families in there and started driving towards our hotel.
In our hotel we had underground parking where we got our bikes.
Once everything was in, I went to the local BMW service to show my bike. This place in Puerto de la Santa Maria did not show that big, but once looked inside it was really huge place. All the BMW motorcycle models where presented in there and I got my bike under investigations after short waiting.
And the end result was that my bike stayed in there, there was indeed something wrong with it and the guy promised to fix it for next week.
Interesting to hear the final story what had been broken in there! I had to take a taxi back to the hotel, lucky for me it was only 20 kilometers away and I had no use for the bike for next two weeks!
Our short route that we took:
This would be our final driving day, we had still 600 kilometers driving for this day, but TomTom was suggesting only 6 hours of driving we had no hurry.
In the morning we already booked hotel in Jerez which was the city where our families would be flying into. Hotel was just 10 minutes away from the airport.
When booking the hotel we saw that in the hotel there should be Sauna available, but as we entered the hotel, they said that Sauna was under repair. What a disappointment.
On the nigh after having something to eat we started looking into our bikes and noticed two things:
- Suzuki Hayabusa's chains where about to be gone, they were making lot of noise and jumping when driving on low speed.
- On my BMW K1200LT rear wheel there was some weird scratches inside it and after looking it closer it looked like rear wheel drive shelter was able to make contact it! Had to find a repair shop for it
This was the route we took:
We woke up early in the morning, quickly ate breakfast and planned route for this day. We ended up driving ~732 kilometers for city called Elche, near Alicante where we found and booked hotel in advance.
Roads were getting much faster to drive on the Spanish side than France, most of the journey we were able to drive 100 km/h so we finished day around 19:00.
Here's the route that we drove:
Again, no toll roads on our way.
We woke up in Grenoble and once looked out to see the weather we started planning for an alternative route. Originally we had planned to see the Alps one more time, go via La Bonette towards Spain, but we decided to take a shortcut and drive directly to Spain.
So, using AutoRoute we calculated that we can make it to the city of Perpignan, which was ~500 kilometers from Grenoble. After some searching for hotels from that area we found an nice hotel a bit ahead on our route in Spain side city called Figueres with a wireless LAN and all.
Day 5 included driving 535 kilometers according to TomTom and we headed to the road at 09:00 and arrived to the hotel a bit after 19:00. Again, we did not take any toll roads, but drove through villages and smaller roads.
Here's the route we took for Day 5:
No we just have to plan for the rest of the trip, we have ~1300 kilometers still before we get to our destination.
Day 4 started out in St. Moritz, we packed again our bikes and headed towards Grenoble France.
Just as we got out from St. Moritz it started raining which continued all the way to Grenoble and got even stronger when we got closer to Grenoble. I have never experienced such a hard rain with my bike!
On this day we climbed to ~2500 meters and 1-2 times close to this + few smaller mountains. Roads were on excellent shape and we really enjoyed all the way, even though it rained all the time!
Here's a map of route we took:
Now for a night we just hope to get our stuff dry for tomorrows route which we still have some negotiations ongoing, just might take a bit shorter route and skip rest of the Alps for now!
Our third day started from Guttaring Austria from where we continued towards St. Moritz which we had set our target for this day.
We drove from Austria through Slovenia and Italy into St. Moritz with a full sunny day. Excellent mountain passes on the way, had to really learn how to drive on these roads! And my bike is really not the best to ride really hard turns...
Here's a map from our route:
Again we managed to ride ~500 kilometers on this day.
In St. Moritz we found a suitable hotel, we even got a private garage for our bikes and the receptionist on this hotel gave me the opportunity to use their own Internet connection to read my mail!
Our second day was a day after Iron But SS1000 ride and we decided to take it pretty easy. Stay out of highways, sit back and relax on the ride.
We had no target on where to get, just that we would get ~500 kilometers for a day. Excellent driving day was looking forward to us, sun was shining all the way, only surprise for the day was waiting when we got closer to Alps, temperature was dropping close to 3 degrees!
Here's our ride for this day:
We rode from Budapest Hungary to Guttaring Austria where we found small little hotel just in the village. First place we tried was full, but they called to another place where we got a room for a night.
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