I was fortunate to get my hands on the British magazine RiDE which has a special on great roads in UK. Even more fortunate is that I have not yet planned the four days following the WIMA rally when I will spend four days travelling south to reach Portsmouth. Now I have some great ideas cutting into Wales and thereby adding another country to my journey, one I yet haven’t seen, neither on bike nor by other means. I look forward to some further planning and plotting to complete my plan for the Grand Tour.
In addition to the great road coverage the magazine is a super good read. I will definitely try to get hold of it again. The magazine contains quite a few readers’ contributions and actually asks for readers’ opinions and travel accounts. I’m definitely going to send them an e-mail describing my project seeing where that might lead.
Amazingly enough I even made good use of the advertisements since I found a site called motohaus.com. Since the Ducati Monster isn’t intended for touring it is almost impossible finding compatible bags and such things. During most of my years I’ve been using a waterproof sack and luggage straps. My first Monster had soft panniers fitted on to frames on the bike.
The panniers hardly fit anything and the frames looked ugly on their own, and when riding a Ducati, of course, you want to look good. Changing bikes I gave that up but kept on dreaming about a hard rear case. So far I have not found a way to fit that, even thought I met a fellow Monster rider last summer who had it and claimed the manufacturer was Givi. Happily contacting Givi they indeed had nothing for me so that dream faded. It’s not so much the need of bringing along more stuff, because during the years I have got used to packing ultralight. What I lack is the possibility to leave my Ducati with luggage unattended not needing to worry. I’m not implying that I bring along valuables, the thing is that I bring everything I need, and without them I will be in trouble.
Now back to my praise of the RiDE magazine. This add for Motohaus made me follow up on the luggage/packing idea once again. And I did find a pack safe system, called PacSafe, A metal net bag is fitted onto the dry bag and locked to the bike. This was a doubt-free buy, and even though the use of it is still to be tested I feel confident. I also added another few things to the cart, an Airpro tubeless repair kit for repairing a puncture and CO2 cartridges to fill up the tyre after the fix. I’ve seen these things before but falsely been told that I needed to remove the tyre from the rim to do this. Therefore, I thought it wouldn’t be an option for me since I lack both tools and confidence to do that. But, after searching the net I found an excellent link with information on how to do it on ADV rider. No need to remove the tyre from the rim, it all seems quite straight forward.
Now I’m confident that if worst comes to worst I can do this. So far I have had two flat tyres during my 12 years of riding. Most people I know have experienced none, but on the other hand, they don’t ride as much as I do. Lets hope I don’t need to test the tyre kit too soon though.
