It’s official(ish) – I’m not losing the ability to ride a heavy touring bike, two-up, with luggage, at low speed. Phew!

Readers may recall my mentioning that I found the Honda Valkyrie harder to manage at very low speed in traffic during our Scandinavian odyssey this past summer. It felt like a pendulum, the back end wanting to sway and me wrestling with the handlebars more than I ever had to do before. It was only when we arrived home, three weeks later, that it occurred to me that my failure to raise the pre-load on the rear suspension might have been to blame.

The only way to check was to load the bike back up to holiday levels and try again. Before that could happen, Ihad to get my Givi brackets welded. My wife Peter had spotted that the welds on the top of both brackets had started to split, which in itself might be an indication that I’d been overloading them for years. Found a local welder in Middlewich who repaired them for £20, which I though was reasonable. Refitting the brackets went against the grain, because the bike looks a while lot better without them, but needs must.

I filled the two panniers with clothing and camping materials to take them to the 9 kg apiece they’d been in the summer, refitted the Kuryakyn roll bag and long waterproof roll-bag, filled them with the same kit we’d carried in August, and added the windscreen and magnetic tank-bag (a handy if heavy item, but at least the weight is carried where it can’t cause any real issues). I jacked-up the rear suspension to level 4, where it should have been, instead of 3 where it had been, and set off.

Happily, the tendency to slalom at low speed and the need for constant tiller-like adjustments at the handlebars had all but disappeared. I stopped, raised the setting to 5 and tried again – even better. So I wasn’t surrendering my riding skill to old age – just the mental alertness to realise more quickly that the shock settings might have something to do with the problem. In any event, I’ll be ditching the Kurykyn roll-bag for a second plastic roll-bag, saving 3.5 kg of high-up, behind-the-axle weight in the process.

I’d been prepared to change bikes for something lighter if the suspension changes hadn’t made any difference. My head had been turned by a BMW R1250RS, which weighs only 236kg compared with the Valkyrie’s 309kg, and the new Triumph Tiger 900 GT Pro, at just 198kg and 21^st-century features like built-in satnav and a phone charger. There might still be a reason to switch, however, because the Valkyrie still generates a pain in my right arm in four places (wrist, forearm, bicep and shoulder). I reckon that’s down to a ruptured bicep tendon some years ago. Not much I can do about that now (if it was going to get reattached, it needed to get done within weeks, and the evidence suggested it wouldn’t be worth the aggro). I find that I can ride my very sporty Ducati for a couple of hours without triggering the arm pain, but it can appear within 30 minutes on the Valkyrie, even one-up without luggage. So the latest plan is to build my arm muscles with weights and see if that helps. If it doesn’t, then a new bike might still be in order. I’ve got the winter months to find out…

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.

Is it time to wave goodbye to our beloved Honda Valkyrie and try something smaller, lighter, more modern? I mentioned when writing about our Norway trip that I’d found my Valkyrie a bit of a handful at low speeds in heavy traffic. It hadn’t been a problem before – was it me, or was it the bike?

When we got home, I weighed our luggage equipment. I was a bit surprised by the results: the round Kuryakyn bag that sits on the rear carrier weighed 3.5kg empty, when the factory weight limit for the carrier is 3kg. We normally pack two sleeping bags in there (1.5kg combined), along with sundry items like a tent lamp, Peter’s Scott waterproof jacket, some adapter plugs and charging wires for the phones and helmets, and a beanie (this trip only). The total with gear was probably 6kg. On top of that we pack our two super-thin air mattresses in a plastic waterproof roll-bag, weighing a further 1.5kg, so we’d been carrying between 7 and 7.5kg up high and well behind the wheel spindle. Some obvious room for improvement there: I plan to ditch the Kuryakyn bag and replace it with another plastic roll-bag, which weighs almost nothing; that would give us a total of a fraction over 3kg back there.

VRCC Norway friend Tommy Oppegaard told me he’d upgraded his rear suspension to take the extra weight of a trailer and suggested I consider the same. That got me thinking: I’d stupidly left the rear shock preload settings at 3, which I used for normal UK riding, instead of 4, which I’ve always used in the past for two-up touring. I realised this early on but my wife said it was comfortable for her and the suspension wasn’t bottoming, and we weren’t planning on riding fast so that we could conserve expensive fuel, so I left it at 3 and forgot about it. It now occurred to me that this could have been a contributory factor to the pendulum effect I’d felt, so that now needs investigation.

I can’t do that just yet, because while we were in Germany we noticed that a weld on each chrome Givi pannier bracket had started to split. The splits never got any worse, but nonetheless they can’t be left like that, so I took them straight off when we got home. We both far prefer the look of the bike without the panniers, so I’m in no rush to get the brackets welded and put everything back on.

While I was weighing everything, I found that the Givi panniers weigh 5kg each and the brackets 1.1kg, meaning that the panniers and brackets add 12.2kg to the bike before we add even a pair of socks. With the Kuryakyn bag, it all comes to 15.7kg of luggage equipment. Maybe that’s not out of the ordinary for motorcycle luggage (I’ve never bothered to check before), but it got me thinking that I need to check out other options before re-fitting the Givis. My last Valkyrie had the factory panniers from the Touring model, which weren’t ideal (won’t take a full-face helmet and aren’t that capacious) but looked fabulous and probably weighed less. I knew from my initial search for luggage some years ago that they were horribly expensive now, borne out by an ad last week on eBay for a second-hand pair, complete with a few paint scuffs and rusty hinges, for £1,000!

So much for the luggage: what about the bike itself? My lower back pain is probably a semi-permanent fixture, possibly an inevitable feature of being 68; some massive proportion of older folk suffer from it, I believe. My physio told me it was all down to bad seating posture, specifically crossing my legs and especially resting one ankle on the opposite knee – my long-preferred position for using my laptop. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in that way. Stop that, he said, and it’ll all go away. I did stop, months ago, and the pain improved considerably, but it hadn’t gone away.

However, I recall that the conventional wisdom used to be that the ideal riding position on a bike was one that splits the rider’s weight between wrists, bottom and feet. The Valkyrie’s cruiser stance puts all that weight on the bum, down through the spine. Can that be good for someone with lower back pain? Maybe a new bike with a less upright riding position would help? An hour or so on my Ducati Sport Classic after we got home suggested that the solution may lie in that line of thinking: no back pain whatsoever. Obviously the single-seat Duke would never make for a comfortable touring mount, even with its after-market, flatter bars, but maybe other bikes with flat-ish bars would work?

I sat on a BMW R1200RS in a dealership yesterday and the riding position certainly felt much more comfortable, and the 236kg weight would be an improvement on the Valkyrie’s 309kg. I owned a new BMW R100 back in 1979 and never really loved it, perhaps because the day after I bought it I rode the new Gold Wing K3 and decided that was better! In comparison, the BMW seemed too tappetty and unrefined. Still, it’s worth a test ride. The new Triumph Tiger 900 GT Pro looks interesting, too, with its 198kg and all manner of modern features, from built-in satnav to a phone charger. Having owned three Valkyries now, for a combined total of 15 years, not to mention the Valkyrie Rune for a further seven, I have a huge affinity for these bikes and a massive resistance to change. However, if changes in my skeletal structure mean that there might be more suitable touring bikes out there, it makes sense to check them out.

First, though, I owe it to the Valkyrie to see whether lighter panniers, a lighter carrier load and the correct suspension setting can redeem it. I’m hoping they can.

The Laon campsite lacked a restaurant but we rode into the old city and found a cobbled street closed to traffic where the locals were celebrating some festival or other (photo above). Jazz bands played and people ate and drank at outside tables, soaking up the vibe. The place was pretty full so we settled for an excellent kebab house where the waiter turned out to be from Afghanistan, where he’d been an interpreter for US forces. He told us that his young children would now grow up safe in France but he regretted that they would know little about their home country, which he doubted would be safe for any of them to visit again.

Peter reckoned she’d seen enough medieval ruins for this trip, so instead of exploring the city next day we went for breakfast at McDonald’s and headed for the coast. Our Flexiplus+ Eurotunnel ticket had been an expensive but necessary indulgence, given that, when we booked it, we had no firm return date in mind. Now, however, it meant that we could pay £10 to change the date and could take the train back that afternoon. Instead, we thought we’d spend one last night under canvas (well, nylon and polyester) and head back the next morning. The idea of camping close to Calais, with its hordes of economic migrants, didn’t hugely appeal, so we headed for Dunkirk and the campsite we’d planned to use on our outward leg before we’d changed the Eurotunnel timing.

The Camping la Lincorne site was on the edge of town, right by the beach and offered incredible value at €9 for the night; we’d been charged an average of about €25 at all our other sites. This one not only had a bar and restaurant but the barmaid cheerfully let us charge both our phones behind the bar. Like many Continental campsites we’d encountered, there were lots of permanent or semi-permanent plots where the caravan was almost welded to a wooden chalet or a large awning tent. There were relatively few basic tents. The pitch next to ours was occupied by a multi-coloured, hand-painted Citroen 2CV with matching trailer-tent. Its elderly occupant and his wife had driven all the way from the UK to Sicily and back in two weeks, which was some going. He wandered over to admire the Valkyrie and share his experiences owning a BMW R69 back in the day.

We dined very well and affordably in the on-site restaurant, Peter enjoying her first-ever taste of rum baba for dessert. Put off post-dinner drinks by the extortionate prices for the past three weeks, we celebrated the last night of our trip with whisky and Cointreau respectively. Up early next morning, there was time for fresh, warm croissants and coffee before riding the final 35 minutes or so to the Eurotunnel terminal at Calais. We didn’t know what to expect in terms of delays or queues, given the problems on the UK end three weeks earlier, but we joined a queue of perhaps three cars and were through in minutes. With the smug self-assurance of people who’d paid extra to travel with some form of priority ticket, we followed the purple road paint in the Flexiplus+ lane to the barrier and were first in line. The light turned green within two minutes, the barrier rose, and we road through, surprised at all this speed and efficiency. All channel crossings should be this easy.

Hah! It turned out that the only reason we were let through was to allow some car-bound passenger to get through and head for his train. We had to wait inside the barrier for perhaps 20 minutes before being allowed to proceed, waiting train-side to be joined by a group of other bikes waiting to board the last, as is the normal procedure for motorcycles. Those bikes had all paid the standard fare. Lesson: Flexiplus+ ain’t worth the money if you’re on a bike, although it does give you the ability to board the next available train, regardless of what time you show up.

Our plan was to meet our son James for lunch in Shoreham before heading on home to Middlewich in Cheshire. He’d just moved there the previous week to take up a new job. A glance at the Garmin showed what looked like an unnecessarily long route, following the M20, M25 and M23. It was 101 miles and would take 1 hour 52 minutes. I thought that was unnecessarily out of our way: surely you could take the coastal route via Hastings and Brighton and that would be quicker? Garmin didn’t offer that option., but Google Maps did, and so we eschewed the motorways and set off on some ridiculous B road that was poorly surfaced, narrow, slow and deeply frustrating. So much for me learning stuff about avoiding the back roads!

We made it to our lunch in Shoreham only 15 minutes late, and afterwards took the fastest route back to Middlewich via the M25, M40, M42 and M6. After three weeks of rising more than 4,700 miles across seven countries, the worst rain hit us when we were about 40 miles from home! It rained steadily, then heavily, and we made it on to our driveway tired, safe, and still dry. The old Rukka and Peter’s much newer Scott and Halverssons did their job. It had been a great trip, even if we didn’t make it to the Lofoten Islands. The Valkyrie hadn’t missed a beat, but even though we’d tried hard to minimise our baggage there were still questions to be answered about our next foray. Was it time to change the bike? Change the luggage? Change the satnav? Time for some reflection.

The holiday was almost over and we were just trying to find a different route back to the UK, avoiding not only the roadworks delays around Hamburg but also the boredom of the Hamburg to Calais sector. We stuck to the autobahn from Puttgarden at first but our Hamburg avoidance strategy brought us on to the back roads for a while, slowing progress considerably. Peter had chosen the Black Forest town of Baden-Baden as our destination, and we got back on the autobahn as soon as we could to cover the miles.

It felt good to be unbound by speed limits again; in Germany, even the camper vans travel at 80 mph! We came across a section of gridlocked traffic that brought back memories of Hamburg, but this time it was different: the cars in the fast lane pulled over to the left, almost hugging the central reservation, to allow motorcycles a safe and easy passage. We trickled past, the weight of the laden Valkyrie notwithstanding, and possibly saved 45 minutes on that stretch. One guy hadn’t read the memo and was blocking our path, but the guy behind him gave him a sharp horn blast and gave us a shrug and a grin to say “some people”! You gotta love German drivers!

Peter had found us a quiet and slightly weird campsite outside the town – weird inasmuch as we were the only people camping, and all the other caravans seemed to be semi-permanently attached to wooden chalets. The facilities were minimal but it had a decent bar and excellent restaurant, which seemed to be the place to eat for miles around: we had to book a table for each of our two nights there.

Baden-Baden, pictured above, is a beautiful and historic town, dating back to Roman times. It has a well-preserved Roman bathhouse, impressive town centre, old churches, a beautiful park – but it doesn’t possess a single bureau de change! Having stocked up with Norwegian krone in advance of our trip, in case our UK credit and debit cards didn’t work everywhere (they didn’t, but more about that in a later blog), but having spent less time than anticipated in Norway, we had loads of krone and not many euros. Staff in the banks shook their heads and suggested we try Stuttgart – 100km away! The relatively unhelpful attitude of the staff in two banks, the campsite and a mini-market was more an indication of disinterest rather than rudeness, but it was in marked contrast to the friendliness we encountered almost everywhere else.

Peter plotted our exit from Germany on a road called the L500, which I’d never heard of but apparently is much loved by German riders. We headed there after breakfast and enjoyed the first few miles as the road twisted and wound its way playfully up a mountain. The traffic was light, but it soon started to rain. Then we were in thick cloud, or possibly fog, reducing visibility to maybe 10 yards in places on an already very challenging and now slightly greasy-looking road. The morning’s ride suddenly became a matter of survival rather than unadulterated pleasure.

The Garmin will receive a blog of its own soon, but it is not a great tool for micro-managing one’s route in such situations – it’s too clunky and not great for seeing the bigger picture. Peter consulted Google Maps to find a way out of the cloud-bound area. It was a good thing, too – Google was able to highlight that our road was closed farther ahead, blocking our planned route into France, which the Garmin, not operating in real time, could not. With Peter giving directions over the intercom, we branched off the mountain road and descended into a valley, eventually emerging out of the cloud into much clearer weather and, near the French border, some welcome sunshine.

If past trips had taught is anything, it was that European motorways are rarely interesting. They’d also taught us that local roads in places like France and Germany take you through interminable villages with their little roundabouts, speed limits and speed humps. Many, perhaps most, of those roundabouts are so small and tight that there is no natural flow for a heavy two-wheeler, so it can be hard work. So it was that day, and after an hour of tedious travel we opted instead for the autoroute towards Paris and Calais. I remember on first long-distance trip in 1976 or thereabouts watching with envy from those rural French roads as the traffic sped past on the autoroute, which as an impoverished 22-year-old I shunned to avoid paying tolls. Yes, the fuel was more expensive on the autoroute, but we’d long since stopped caring, and €1.90 a litre for E10 no longer seemed extortionate after paying £1.90 in the UK earlier in the summer. We made faster progress toward the French coast and stopped for the night at a campsite in the medieval city of Laon.