The wrong bike?

By the time I left Wiesbaden the next morning I was starting to get a feel for how much fuel the bike was getting through. Over about six hundred miles it had been fairly consistent at around sixty miles to the gallon. I hadn't worked it out exactly but it was within one or two mpg of that and I was wondering what if anything I could do to improve things as I set off down the spur motorway linking Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. Fifteen minutes later I realised that my musings had meant I'd missed the turn onto the main autobahn to Nuremburg. The detour before I was back on the right road was about 12 miles and I concluded that not getting lost was probably a good start if I wanted to cut down on fuel usage. Exactly why the bike was using so much was a bit of a mystery. OK it had a screen on the front and panniers sticking out at the sides but I'd been careful(ish) to not extend these beyond the area my body would cover so the total frontal area shouldn't be much greater than normal. It's not as if I'm that big either so it wasn't a case of small bike and pie eating rider. I'd also been careful when setting the bike up to check the things that could affect fuel consumption such as the state of the air filter, the carb settings and ignition timing. All of these had been checked and rechecked and I knew they were as they should be. Whatever the reason, and despite all the slipstreaming behind the trucks, one gallon of fuel was going through the engine every 60 miles so I was going to have to face up to the extra cost.

It was at this point I started to wonder if I'd brought the right bike. I could get 60mpg out of my CCM 600, I wouldn't have to hide behind the trucks and with twelve volts available from the battery rather than the bloop's miserly six I could use my electrically heated clothing to keep warm. Also I'd be able to do the trip in two days each way rather than three so saving about £90 in hotel bills. If I really had to travel at 50mph with minimal electrics and only a kickstart to get things going my XR600 Honda would do between 80 and 90 mpg at those speeds. The bloop was starting to seem like the worst of all worlds. So why had I brought it? Mainly because of my experience of four previous Elephant rallies. Getting to within about 20-30 miles of the site was easy; any bike, and usually the bigger the better, would do. The roads would be kept ice free and there was no real difficulty. It was the last section where bike choice was important. These were usually small rural roads that the gritting lorries wouldn't prioritise so snow and ice could be found everywhere and a tall, top heavy, overweight bike would be a liability. On a bad year a visit to the ditch twenty miles from the rally site could end the trip very quickly as I'd come close to finding out the year I went with my brother on a 250cc MZ. When I checklisted desirable characteristics for a bike in those conditions the bloop ticked many of the boxes. I'd put up with crawling along the autobahn to make sure I'd could get through the snow.

Of course there were other methods of getting through the snow and one of the joys of the Elephant rally is seeing what solutions other people have come up with. The obvious one is a sidecar and the rally site is usually littered with various (mainly unlikely) pairings of bike and something with a wheel stuck out to one side. I'm loath to call them sidecars because that conjures up an image that many of these "solutions" don't conform to. A small caravan bolted to the side of the bike for example. At the other extreme two bikes bolted together with a rigid steel frame holding them together; two engines, two riders and two number plates at the back! These latter guys, I'm proud to say, were British.

My target for the day was a hotel in Regensburg, a town about 50 miles from the rally site and the plan was that I'd arranged to meet a fellow "Elephanteer" there. We'd then travel down together the next morning although as Dave was going to be on a 1200GS BMW it might be a somewhat asymmetric fifty miles. When I arrived at the hotel at around 4.00pm I saw two other UK registered BMWs in the car park, one of which had its drive chain tied up near the seat with a bungee strap. A few minutes later I met Paul, the stranded bike's owner and heard how the chain had snapped, fortunately only a few hundred meters from the hotel. Unfortunately in the act of snapping it had broken off a chunk of the engine casting and Paul was on the phone to the local BMW dealers to see if they could help. Half an hour later a van turned up and took the bike away. "Phone us in the morning" were the driver's parting words.