Minirolls Musings

The Holiday That Finally Came

Finally!

After rebooking and changing and checking and testing and hoping it would happen, the morning arrived for us to start our holiday.

After a hard days ride uphill yesterday, today we were going to Dyfi bike park and getting an uplift. This is where you pay a chap to drive you and your mates up the hill in the back of a Landover, with the bikes in a trailer. You then spend 20 mins coming down the hill, back to the start, where you catch another Landy to the top again, rinse and repeat. So much easier than pedaling to the top, and before you say it’s cheating, I did enough uphill pedaling yesterday not to feel even slightly guilty about it!

Snowdon Struggle

Well that was equal parts exhilarating and exhausting!

It’s funny how the human mind has the capacity to ignore, and even forget, the suffering of the human body, when the suffering is in pursuit of a goal. For us, it was the summit of Snowdon. This was not the end goal, but actually the start of the reason we had travelled here; to descend on mountain bikes.

Snowdon Preparation

Oh god what have I agreed to…

Steve has been pushing me to come mountain bike down Snowdon for a while and finally I had relented.

Yamaha Offroad Experience ’21

I had forgotten how much I like the smell of two-stroke, pine forest and sweat.

The chap in front had brought his own bike which was just singing along. We blasted along the fire roads and every now and again he would give it a cheeky squeeze sending gravel shooting back at me. It wasn’t a race, we were heading to the next area of technical trail to tackle, so I just hung back and enjoyed the view, the smell and the experience of handling such a wonderful machine.

Home Sweet Home

We had spent the night in a Brecon car park with a Victorian river garden adjacent. We walked the promenade and around the quaint village and enjoyed a rare, warm and dry evening in Wales. Just because we were in a van in a carpark doesn’t mean it was all stodgy pasta and plasticky water. Oh no no!

The Tale Of The Ducati – Pt.5

The email to Ducati clung to my fingers as they reluctantly depressed the keyboard rhythmically…

I had to get another document that was identical to the one they had already supplied, apart from one, minor difference. I hated every moment of it, because I knew that the request was completely unreasonable and that the poor secretary who, until this point, had been very nice and helpful, would shortly think I was being ridiculous for the sake of annoying her…

The Tale Of The Ducati – Pt.4

What came next, was the most vexing and pointless application of bureaucracy I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.

After checking off each of the points on the rejection letter I had received, I was confident that I had met all their requirements. I expected the next letter from the DVSA to be a bog standard template letter with my name at the top and a Registration assignment somewhere in the middle.

Apparently not….

The reasons, as you will shortly find out, caused me to literally seethe with anger. I’ve never seethed before. I may have hummed or growled with minor annoyance, but never seethed. I’m quite a calm person I like to think, but what followed next brought my blood up to boiling temperature as I achieved a level and intensity of anger known only as SEETHING…

The Tale Of The Ducati – Pt.3

Up to this point, while it had been vastly more expensive than I had ever imagined, at least it had been relatively straightforward. Basically, bend over and let anybody take a bite out of my ass for as much as they wanted.

Now I actually had to get the piece of paper that would let me ride the bike on the road, the registration document (V5c)

The Tale Of The Ducati – Pt.2

I was right!

When I got the quote for shipping it came to £542. I considered that a bargain ( compared to the abandonment and total loss I’d experience if the Ducati continues not to sell… ) and arranged with the motorcycle dealership to have the bike delivered to the port on my behalf.

Category: Travel