On the 5th Feb 2012 Maurice & Kev left sunny Adelaide to ride to not so sunny Sydney where they had to wash the bikes again!  Waiting for them, and the other intrepid travellers, at the shipping terminal was Andrew from Get Routed.  I felt sorry for him because as any of you who know Maurice & Kev, will testify they can be a bit mmmm, how shall I put it? FUSSY.  Apparently though these guys, who do this for a living, do actually know what they are doing and things went smoothly.  The only thing they found difficult was trying to keep the panniers clean whilst wrapping them. 

Our baby safely secured to the cradle.

All snuggled up in the container.

Two happy campers with the nothing left to do but worry.

The planning for the trip could start in earnest now.  We had two things in mind from the very beginning, two weeks on the Isle of Man to watch the crazy or as Maurice prefers to call them extremely gutsy,TT riders. Yes you guessed it, that was Maurice's idea.  My part of the deal was I wanted to go to the Edinburgh Tattoo, must be all those years of being around uniforms. By the way that's is where the blog name came from, just in case you were wondering.

Safely tucked away in its new room.



Map of the I.O.M.
(R.I.P. Deano)



The map of the UK & Europe with some of the proposed places to visit.

You can't really tell from the map but the trip will start with us flying into Barcelona Spain to collect the bikes from the shipping terminal.  It will end about 51/2 months later when we drop the bikes off at the shipping terminal at Felixstowe UK.

So we got a very good deal on the bikes but now we had to get them from Darwin to Adelaide.  Kev came up and Maurice and he did some male bonding during the three day trip down which included some interesting moments for both of them.  Kev had a rear end malfunction that could have ended up a lot worse and Maurice ran out of fuel (thanks to a dicky fuel gauge) and also left his wallet behind in one of the motels.  All in all not to bad for a first trip; that is of course until Kev got home but that is a story best told by them!  

Maurice & Kev at the Daly Waters Pub.
 It was also a pit stop for Charlie Boorman and is in his book.

 

I should know better than to ask Maurice what he wants to do!  This time the question was "if you could do one thing what would it be?"  The answer was ride a Motorcycle around Europe.  Fast forward about 2 years to April 2011 and here we are test riding a new Beemer in Darwin.  

The more the merrier of course so enter Kev & Karen who just happened to be in Darwin at the right time to test ride their new Beemer. 

       Well somebody’s got to do it!!!