My friend told me how to get to this town and he told me when to turn left, but I saw a sign saying that I should go straight and then turn left a couple hundred yards down the road so instead of listening to my friend, I followed the sign and wound up on a single track road With a switch back in potholes with my wife on the back and I’m 76 and she’s 75 and even though she sold me my first BMW motorcycle in 1973 when she was a BMW motorcycle dealer both of us are way past our sell date and this is exactly the kind of road where you fall over and although I’ve done that a half a dozen times alone, I don’t wanna do it with Eileen on the back and a car is coming down the other way and I have to make a 22° turn at the vertex with a pothole the size of an old galvanized wash tub. I stop. I say to Eileen that she’s gonna have to walk down. I’m gonna turn the motorcycle around but she’s gonna have to walk down and she’s in her motorcycle boots and all her gear and it’s not just a little way down. If the motorcycle falls over, there is no way that Eileen and I are going to be able to get it up even though it’s a Yamaha T 700 it’s loaded down with stuff and it’s aluminum panniers and they bend and I’ve got panniers to prove that. My bike is a 2018 and it was Touratech’s exhibition bike. It’s a magnificent motorcycle. It will climb a wall. It’s gotten more torque at an idol then my BMW 1200 GS adventure back in the United States by far. You can start in third gear on a level road without slipping the clutch a whole lot. Second gear is a snap from the hole. As a matter fact at 43,000 km I changed the chain in the rear sprocket and I had them put in a sprocket with three teeth fewer.  I didn’t want to change the geometry too much but it’s got torque like a single lunger. Anyway, poor Eileen had to walk down. We can talk to each other because we have intercoms in our helmets and they work for a pretty long distance. I had to take the motorcycle down to a spot where the crown wasn’t so great that the motorcycle wouldn’t fall over if I tried to put it on its side stand, and it wouldn’t fall over when she got on it . And I had to put it in first gear of course so that it wouldn’t slide forward. And when we both finally got on, I had to tilt it off to the right, and you can see that I tilted it a little farther that was comfortable and got a little scared that it was gonna fall over . I don’t know why I do this! I’ve cut out some of it. It was in May and we were about 3000 feet. I guess so it wasn’t too hot, but it was a bit of a walk and a bit embarrassing. But better to be embarrassed than be hurt. Eileen never lost her composure. It’s now a year later and I’m in Corsica on my way to Sardinia and then Milan to meet my son who’s coming over and he’s gonna rent a bike and we’re going to do the dolomites together and then bring him back to Milan and then I’m headed down to Rome for September and Eileen‘s coming over but we’re gonna stay in a nice little place that I’ve rented and a compound owned by some wonderful people. I met earlier this summer just through booking.com.
#adventurebike #motorcycle #france #ardeche ##motorcycleaccidents #touratech #yamahatenere700
2 Comments
Oh dear.
Staying cool and doing your thing was the best you could do! Actually the french are very relaxed and understand such situations well.
That is a monstrous bike! Maybe you should do yourself a favour and get rid of the luggage before riding the french mountain roads.