After a good nights sleep we left Cobham services on Saturday morning, heading for Maidstone services on the M20, We planned to meet the others there so that we could all ride into the Chunnel together so we would be on the same train.
Paul decided to check his tyre pressure only to have the air pump at the services remove all of the air from his tyres, after a bit of faffing around he got sorted and we set off.
When we arrived at Maidstone services most of the others were there.
Russ
Nige AKA brad mole
Ada
Scotty
Curt
Nathan and Lynsey were not there though. We waited as long as we could but had to leave with out them in the hope they would be at the Chunnel.
At the services we found that Sulla had lost one of the bolts that hold his gear swivel bar to his engine case and had lost a lot of oil through the hole. This resulted in the first bodge of the trip. With it “fixed” and his oil topped up we set off.
It wasn’t long before we arrived at the Channel Tunnel and checked in, the trains were delayed by an hour due to the volume of traffic on the bank holiday weekend. This however meant that Nathan and Lynsey had time to show up.
With everyone now present we boarded the train for Calias, now the adventure could begin!
We had three brand new GT200 top ends with us who were all running in, two of them had pillions too, so we had to keep the speeds down for a few hundred miles,
Sulla’s carb fell off once more and Nathan ran out of fuel on the way to our over night destination, Reims. On the way we took a small detour to the old race track at Circuit du Reims-Gueux. Another opportunity to get the flag out.
We had a hotel booked Reims but when we arrived we were told there was only 1 room booked and that there were no other rooms available. A few looked for rooms on booking dot com but it soon became obvious that Reims was fully booked, there were no rooms available anywhere so we started looking further out of town.
The only place on rout that had enough spaces for us all was 80 miles away in Troyes. It was now after 9:30pm and everyone was tiered. We had no other option but to press on.
We had a few small problems after leaving Reims but things got worse as we got off the motorway in Troyes. Scotty’s stator died just after the toll booth.
Most of the group had carried on but then had to wait while Chris and me went back to find him. It was decided to tow Scotty to the hotel and fix it in the morning.
We arrived at the hotel after 3:30am and then had more fun and games getting into the rooms. The hotel was booked by the other hotel that had let us down in Reims, they had told us that one key would be there and all the other rooms keys would be in the room the one key opened. Warren found a key and went to the room but there were no other keys in that room. After a phone call it became clear that the room we had got into wasn’t one of our rooms at all. Finally at after 4am we all got a room and crashed out.
The people who had set off from home that morning had all done over 500 miles that day and had been on the road for nearly 24 hours.
Day two track