2004 - And they are off.......

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Well after all the planning we were finally on the road.....well the train actually because we took the fabulous, quick, non-sickly Eurotunnel across to Calais. We had planned to get through France and Spain as quickly as possible and get to Morocco, where our Euros would stretch a bit further, but we quickly realised our butts were going to need a steady introduction to the motorbike seats! After 5 or 6 hours of motorway it felt like an ancient form of torture and most days we set up camp in the early afternoon...... what wimps! On the upside a kind man from Cleethorpes we met in a campsite near Le Mans introduced us to 50p bottles of red wine, which we proceeded to use for medicinal purposes!!
At first I looked like a very small person, with Alzheimers trying to ride their Dads bike! Going South through France on nice easy roads gave us (well me really), the chance to get used the 18 tons of luggage we are carrying on the bikes and gave us time to consider what we could dump at the next service station!!
I almost dropped the bike doing a U-turn in an area the size of a football pitch just outside Bordeaux! Luckily a small crowd gathered to watch my incompetence, so that helped!

It took us 4 days to get to the Spanish border and much of that was spent on the road or setting up camp. We did meet an unfeasibly fat Dutch man eating a bucket of donuts travelling from Holland to St Malo on a tiny 50cc moped and managed to buy a 10ml syringe (for our Scotoiler) from a phamacist who now thinks we are heroin addicts........oh yes and the weather was rubbish all the way to Spain.