Every motorcycle tour teaches me something, which I then try to incorporate next time to make the whole experience even better. You’d think that after 46 years, with some time off for other pursuits and more conventional family holidays, I’d have it all sorted now, but either I’m a slow learner or you never stop learning.

One innovation we tried this year was to bring very few clothes. Normally I’d bring a spare pair of jeans and maybe a week’s worth of T-shirts, underwear and socks. My wife Peter is usually a bit more sensible but generally we’d both carry more stuff than we needed. This time, to save weight and space, we cut that right back: we carried only two to three changes of underwear, T-shirts and socks. Mrs Peter had seen an ad for men’s underwear designed for camping and said to be fast-drying, so I bought three pairs. At a sale in one of the camping shops I bought a pair of very light, thin, Factor 50-rated long trousers for wearing off the bike, which meant I could ditch the spare jeans. Speaking of jeans, it took me years to work out that the pain in my backside that seemed to set in within hours, regardless of what bike I was on, was largely down to the seams of the rear pockets. When the world seemed to switch to stretch jeans, and conventional non-stretch ones were hard to find and very expensive, I followed the herd and bought M&S stretch jeans and found that not only are they supremely comfortable on a bike, the pocket seams are far softer and the sore bum problem has disappeared.

Travelling with far fewer clothes worked just fine, the new underwear less so. It took exactly the same time to dry as conventional items, so that was a tenner wasted. Obviously we had to wash our clothes every night or second night, but it made perfect sense. Our microfibre towels dried almost instantly and are indispensable. The attempt to take less stuff almost had us leave our traditional Kuryakyn roll bag behind, but at the last minute I decided we needed the extra space for stuff like trainers, flip-flops and sleeping bags; we’d have been better off without it, as the extra weight high up and far back proved to be a pain. We’ve had the Givi panniers for several years; they work, but aren’t waterproof, aren’t pretty and are too wide for easy filtering, so we’re exploring affordable alternatives, which may not exist. Even a scuffed pair of OEM Valkyrie hard panniers seems to command £1,000 on eBay, which just seems too much.

The Oxford magnetic tank bag is invaluable and is a definite keeper. It weighs a lot, due to the magnets, but the weight is not in a place where it causes problems, and we’ve long since perfected a double-act for removing and holding it during refuelling. The waterproof cover is a bit naff, billowing away in the wind but never actually disappearing.

One area for future improvement is our riding gear. I’ve long been a fan of Motolegends, the Guildford-based bike clothing specialists. They send out regular missives about great gear, and a few weeks before we left they wrote at length about the unsuitability of winter waterproof suits for summer touring. What they said made perfect sense, but I didn’t fancy spending a fortune on new stuff – have you seen the prices of riding gear these days? Wow!

My Rukka jacket and trousers are 19 years old and, barring one 100-mile rain-soaked trip in 2020, have always kept me dry and warm. As an older laminated suit, it’s also quite heavy and devoid of air vents, so it’s far from ideal on a 30°C day in summer. For that, I have a Hein Gericke summer jacket with plenty of air vents, but it’s not waterproof and it’s not warm. We’d been advised to expect temperatures between 5° and 30° in Norway, with possible rain, so I wore the Rukka. Next time, I’ll follow the advice from Motolegends: wear a summer riding jacket and maybe Rokkertech jeans (at £300-odd a pair!) and pack a waterproof Scott jacket and Scott trousers for rainy days. My wife swears by her Scott jacket over her leather one and says it keeps her warm, too. It should mean I stay much more comfortable on warm-to-hot days and won’t have to find room to stow the bulky Rukka pants.

My short Daytona boots were great, staying warm, dry and comfortable throughout, but not too warm on hot days. My Triumph winter gloves were perfect for the wet, cold days, but the well-worn IXS summer gloves I’ve used for about eight years have started bunching on the right palm and causing callouses on my throttle hand, so they’ll have to be replaced. Our Shoei Neotec 2 helmets are basically fine, especially with the convenience of the neat intercom system, even though my head is between two sizes: one removable liner is too tight around the forehead, the other lacks padding on the top of the head. The ‘accessory’ sponge Motolegends supplied solves the top-of-head issue most of the time. In any event, with £560 invested in the Shoei, it’ll have to last a few years yet.

The Garmin satnav was the subject of a separate blog. It still works, and God knows we’d have got totally lost without it many times, but I think it’s time for a change to something more modern and less clunky. So there are a few things we need to do before the 2023 touring season in that endless quest for perfection.