My first trip to North Wales

I had never been to North Wales until yesterday. The Reclaim North Wales campaign caught my imagination & I decided that it would be a piece of cake armed with my trusty ’02 VFR & the bike-mad ex along as pillion for company. The ride up from Poole took longer than expected.

We left at 7am & at the midday meeting time we were still several miles short of Shrewsbury & we pulled in feeling sorry for ourselves at a biker Cafe called the Lazy Trout.

In the carpark were a couple of V-maxes, a Caponord, two R1’s, an R6, a Tuono & a Fireblade. The riders were just finishing their lunch. They said they were headed for Betws-y-Coed & we were welcome to tag along.

Now I didn’t get any of their names, (unimportant when you’re blasting along at 80mph I guess!) but without these guys I think we might have just turned around & gone home. They took us with them through that fantastic countryside that I’d never seen, it was also my first time riding with a pack. I felt like I was in Mad Max!

We eventually made it to Betws-y-Coed just after 4pm, my trip said 325miles. We were exhausted but the excitement of seeing all those riders & their machines from the four corners of Britain, jamming the local roads, lifted our spirits & after half an hour’s rest we were on the ride home.

We rode again with these gentlemen, bidding farewell to R1 man who had fuelling issues, the other Birmingham boys & much later the V-max guys & Caponord man had escorted us to their home town of Kidderminster & stuck us on the M5 home.

The next couple of hours were gruelling motorway slog back to Dorset. So despite the crippling wrist & knee problems, R1 man’s injectors, the mad Tuono rider’s sheared off sprocket bolts (too many wheelies perhaps?!) & the noise of throbbing exhausts still filling my head when I got to bed at 2am the following morning, it was worth it!

Worth it just to see that one lonely copper stood by his patrol vehicle grimacing at the fleet of bikers filing out of Betws-y-Coed. Well done motorcylists of Britain & a big thankyou to the guys of Birmingham & Kidderminster!