Firstly why on earth did I decide to go to Germany in the first place. It's the middle of winter, it's dark a lot more of the day than it's light and if it isn't snowing and below zero then the conditions are too mild. I suppose that's the whole point of the Elephant rally. Even though there are tougher events out there now it has some sort of reputation as representing a kind of pinnacle and it's been going long enough that many if not most bikers will have heard of it. That's not a reason for freezing to death for a week on the autobahn though. I suppose it ultimately comes down to whatever it is that attracts you to motorcycles in the first place. I don't have any interest in fastest-kid-on-the-block type sports bikes and although I watch the occasional MotoGP race on TV it's decades since I last went to watch a race live. In fact I don't have much interest in any kind of two wheeled motorsport and I've always ridden bikes more as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. By that I mean I enjoy going places on them. Whether that means coaxing a clapped out Lambretta from Essex to see Stonehenge as I did when I was 16 or trying (and failing) to get to Timbuktoo on an XR600 10 yrs ago, the bike is a means to that end. It's integral to the journey and therefore not interchangeable with a car or an airline flight, but it is an adjunct. That's the spirit in which I went to the Elephant rally four times back in the 1970's; I wanted to see what it was all about. Along the way it's had a huge impact on the way my path through life has gone but at its core that's all it is, just motorised curiosity.
So why this year - after all the 70's was a long time ago and you're not getting any younger etc etc. I had thought about it before, and probably considered it each year for the last ten or so but somehow something or other wasn't right each time. Either I didn't have a suitable bike or we were going away on a family holiday or work got in the way or something. This was no great burning desire, if anything that sounded better came along I'd quite happily abandon plans for the Elephant and take the better offer. Last year though I was offered the Bloop. I thought straight away it would be perfect for the Elephant and I agreed to take it on the basis that I'd see if I could get it going well enough to do the trip. In view of what I've written over the course of the earlier entries in this blog you might wonder about the use of the word "perfect"in relation to the bike. After all I must have known it's slow, mechanically rudimentary and well beyond its design life before I chose to go on it. If I'm going to spend a week in some seriously taxing conditions why would I not use a bike with at least some sort of life support potential - decent electrics, good lights, a turn of speed on the autobahn, that sort of thing. Well, I've outlined the idea behind a lightweight bike in snow earlier in the blog and it's perfectly valid but it's not the only reason. I could have lowered the XR600 so I could get my feet down and used that (I still might do that!) but the Bloop had other attractions. Firstly there was a perverse attraction of using something totally unsuitable. My Elephant history is full of using unsuitable machinery. Apart from the first time when we did use a halfway sensible bike I've used these -
In case you don't recognise them they are, from left to right, a Honda C50, an MZ250 which we used two-up and a Suzuki TS100. Nothing there which would come into the sensible category. The Elephant rally for me has been something where I seem to need to turn a drama into some sort of crisis, to make things harder than they need be and for no other reason than it amuses me. So that why the Bloop was perfect.
There's no need to invite trouble though. Despite everything I would prefer to get there and back without huge issues or problems. The last time I went - on the TS100 - I caught flu on the way back and spent a week in bed afterwards. I certainly didn't want a repeat of that. The year I went on the C50 the engine blew up and it had to be abandoned in Germany. I'd prefer not to repeat that either. So a degree of foresight and preparation was in order. It was a lightweight trip that I had to take seriously.
Over the summer and autumn of 2012 I took the whole bike to bits and checked just about everything. It had been sitting in an unheated garage for 20yrs so corrosion was likely to be the biggest problem. The piston was seized in the bore but with care and patience I managed to rescue all the parts intact and reuse them. The inside of the fuel tank was totally rusty and needed cleaning out with hydrochloric acid. I had endless problems with the wiring loom and it took me a good month to get the right hand indicator working reliably. The fuel tap leaked (then part of it snapped off) and I managed to break the speedometer glass by dropping a spanner on it. All of these problems I worked through as well as repainting items such as the stands and footrest brackets, polishing corrosion off of numerous aluminium parts and doing what I could to rescue the chrome. I then set about trying to protect it against the ravages of salt laden winter roads. I covered everything with a combination of Waxoyl and / or ACF50, made extended front and rear mudflaps to try and keep overspray down and lacquered a lot of the chrome as a third layer of defence. Much of the rest of the bike was still in good condition - the chain ran inside a metal case and was still oily even after twenty years. I did take a chance with the tyres though. As far as I'm aware they were the 1970's original fitment but they had no signs of cracking or oxidation so I decided I'd see how things went. They still seemed to have plenty of grip and the MOT man seemed happy with them so they stayed. In the event they gave me no problem at all and after 1800+ miles, 90+ percent of which was on wet roads I'm still very happy with them. By all normal criteria they should have been death traps but they were fine. Here's what the bike looked like around the end of summer 2012 -
I then had to consider the bike's limitations and what could I do about it. Firstly, luggage capacity. It already had a rack fitted and a medium sized top box bolted to it. That was a good start but the rack was never going to take much weight as at the back it was bolted to the rear light fitting. Overloading that would eventually break the rear mudguard so it would have to be restricted to light items only. That meant not using my huge 1970's top box which although it had my previous Elefantentreffen stickers on it was too heavy empty, never mind loaded. In the end I used the smaller box and just kept stuff like washing kit, towel, first aid kit etc in it. Much of the heavier stuff was going to go into a set of period 70's panniers that I found in the garage. That meant making up some sort of framework to mount them and it took me about a month to construct the side frame and the fittings from scratch. Quite a bit of effort went into ensuring that they would all come apart as intended when it was below zero and my fingers were frozen. In the event they all worked faultlessly and I've chalked that up as a success. The tops of the panniers were deliberately intended to be at seat height so I could use them as a platform to mount a large holdall sideways. That was to contain the large, bulky items like the sleeping bag, tent etc. That also worked faultlessly so another tick in the yes box although with hindsight I'd put the spare petrol can somewhere else next time. I spent a lot of time considering how much spare petrol to take. With only 7L available in the main tank I was fearful about running out on some lonely stretch of autobahn and looked at the merits or otherwise of taking 2L, 3L, 4L and 5L in various combinations of cans. In the end the symmetry of putting a 2L can of petrol at one end of the holdall and 2 litres of oil at the other won me over so that's what I went with. That was probably about right as the 2L supply never actually got used although it was comforting at times to know it was there.
I made a screen for the front based on memories of the last Elephant trip - the one where I came back with flu. John made his "cat-flap fairing" for the Honda he went on and survived ok. I didn't and didn't. This picture says it all -
So some sort of weather protection was a must. The handlebar muffs were borrowed from my CCM and the screen knocked up out of bits of plastic bought on ebay. Leg protection was an area that taxed my imagination but in the end I started feeling a little uneasy about keeping on bolting stuff to a 10bhp motorcycle. It was slow enough without all these extras so in the end I called a halt to it. The day before I left there was one last addition though. I put a kind of deflector strip along the top of the screen to try and stop an aerodynamic monotone - like you get when you blow across the top of a bottle - that came from the edge of the screen. It was purely a guess but it worked. So, the screen was a success. It kept me a lot drier and warmer than I would have been without it and cost next to nothing. It slowed the bike down quite a bit and was probably responsible for knocking 10mpg off the fuel consumption but it was worth the effort. I preferred being warmer and drier than being a few miles per hour faster. And I didn't catch flu.
So, staying with the bike, what didn't work? The main thing that disappointed me were the LED spotlights. Even when it was working the Bloop headlight was terrible and for months I'd considered what I could do to upgrade it. Auxiliary lights seemed to be the way to go and I had in mind a set up where they would go on and off with the dipswitch. To do that with high powered LEDs meant importing a load of bits from the US and making a system from scratch and I dithered around thinking about it until I didn't have enough time to do it. So the battery powered bicycle units I bought on ebay seemed like a good second choice. Two of them together seemed staggeringly bright - easily car headlight intensity - and I was very please with the way they mounted on the bike. The batteries went in the tank bag and I could just about turn them on and off manually. Their construction seemed solid enough so I didn't strip them down beforehand. That was a big mistake. They both failed because the high frequency engine vibration snapped off poorly supported components on the circuit boards - the same part on both lights. That would have been foreseeable and preventable if only I'd taken a look at them beforehand.
The lithium batteries that came with the lights worked well but being 8.4v needed some bespoke electronics to power my sat-nav and tent light, something I knocked up a couple of days before departure using some cheap components and lots of duct tape. Much to my surprise the converter box worked throughout the trip without any problems. A few other small items fell down on the job though. A fish tank digital thermometer bought from ebay for £2.50 proved to be not only inaccurate but the display continually reset itself as soon as the bike engine started - vibration again. A matching digital clock filled up with water every time it rained (ie every day)and I was having to dry it out overnight in every hotel. My £2.00 last ditch back up for powering the sat-nav, a USB output wind generator, never worked properly and is still under investigation at the moment. How hard can it be - the wind turns the generator and that charges a small internal battery, but it never seemed to have any charge in it. There was plenty of wind as I rode along at 50mph so it should have worked.
What else? My Lidl's tank bag came close to not making it back. It was too big for the Bloop and kept slipping off the side of the tank. It also had three zips break over the time I was away - the first before I even left. It wasn't waterproof and I took to keeping all the paperwork and electronics in a bin liner inside the bag as additional protection. When I got back I found the one year warranty still had a few days to run and they gave me my money back. It wasn't actually a bad design but I just wished they'd paid the Chinese a few euros more to make it slightly better quality.
So that was the bike. It did the job and it was an amusing, if not particularly relaxing, ride to Bavaria and back. It's strange how something as small, slow and disposable as the Bloop should not be relaxing; what exactly was I un-relaxed about? Well it wasn't because I was going so fast that the concentration level needed wore me out, but having to rev the engine to it's maximum all the time to make any sort of progress is equally wearing - and you're having to do it for longer each day because you're going so slowly. Every little gust of wind, every vehicle that came past, every tiny little hill, whether I leant forward or not, all made a difference to what speed the bike would do. I could even detect a difference between dry roads (not many) and wet roads - the effort of clearing water by the tyres slowed the bike perceptibly. In many ways this was closer to sailing than biking; I spent more time reading the wind than reading the road signs. On a bigger bike a long motorway trip can become tedious because the limitations on progress are mainly external - keeping within the speed limit for example or fuel consumption, things like that. There's not much you can do about a speed limit apart from accepting it and relaxing as best you can but that was a problem I never had to face with the Bloop; even in 50mph roadworks sections I was struggling to keep up. If you relaxed for a moment you'd find yourself doing 30mph rather than 50.
Trying to draw all of this together into some sort of conclusion is slightly difficult because there is a contradiction in all of this - the more sensible choice of bike I make, the less I want to do the trip. The Bloop, for all its shortcomings, was probably close to ideal in terms of motivating me to go in the first place. I have two much more "sensible" bikes for this kind of thing in the garage and I've not gone in the last twenty years.
Would I do it again? Perhaps. It's not the conditions or anything that would put me off - some forethought and decent equipment and the climate isn't really a problem but it's more fundamental than that. This year I went out of curiosity; I wanted to see what had happened to the rally since my last visit decades earlier. Having seen it, that reason isn't going to work a second time. I would go as a social activity - in a group with a bunch of friends but these days biking has become more and more a solitary activity as people have moved away or lost interest or gone in different directions so I don't know too many people who would consider the week spent riding to Bavaria and back and camping in the snow a "must do" project. I'd have no problem finding people who'd be happy to spend a week in the snow but they'd usually want be on skis.
Now that I'm back from the rally I've been wondering what to do with the bike. Previously my vision never stretched that far - probably because some part of me didn't actually believe it would make it back in one still usable piece. On the back of a recovery truck or dumped with a seized engine or a snapped frame or something equally terminal, maybe but for it to be just to be sitting on the drive not showing any sign of distress from the trip wasn't something I'd thought likely. I don't have any more motorcycle based trips planned at the moment other than a few local ones but in my wilder moments I've thought about using it for a trip down to our flat in the Alps, perhaps in the summer or early autumn - something perfectly feasible, or even for my next trip down to West Africa (if the political situation there ever stabilises). A cruising speed of 45 - 50 mph is fine for that - there's no point in rushing past it, you're not going to be there too many times. For the time being though I'll just see how things work out.
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