The Dom way round: I was feeling a little smug

Saturday, 26 November 2011

I was feeling a little smug

Took my bike out today. I spent the day with lots of other fat, middle aged balding men, an alarming number of people in wheelchairs or with crutches and a few scantilly clad women - all who seemed to be called Carole Nash.

Yes, that's right, I was at the NEC Motorcycle live show.

BMW 1200GSA "Triple black edition" £16,000!

I must admit I walked around with a bit of a smug attitude. Two years ago I'd gone to the show needing to buy a few things for my trip. Now I've done my trip (and am fully aware that I didn't need half the things I took!) and looked at all the stuff I could get on the Touratech stall and thought to myself - Hum, you don't need all that!


Fully loaded touratech bike

I found the "traveldri -plus" stand and had a chat with Sam Manicom. He's been very helpful in getting me started on writing my book and it was great to catch up with him again.

Kawasaki haven't quite grasped the realities of two-up overland travel

There were also some weird bikes

Oh - when I get old I can see myself touring Europe on this - BMW 1600

Triumph's new Adventure bike - very nice

Damn - where did I park?

So, I'm still trying to write, and my plan is to finish a first draft by March. I'm currently writing and am nearly on the Namibian section. It's hard to get anything done during the week so I try to spend a few hours at the weekend but even that can be hard sometimes. I try to update my blog once a month - so if you want to know how it's going, come back...

1 comment:

Diane15 December 2011 at 15:59
Just found your blog will be going back and reading some of your posts from way back. My parents, bother and myself drove from the UK to Rhodesia in 1953 so your travels interest me. See
www.great1953trek.nidi.org.uk/
Cheers Diane
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Hello

Hi. My name is Dom and in July 2010 I rode a motorcycle (partly) around the world. I started in Alaska and headed for Panama. It took me 6 months and I covered 21,000 miles. I then shipped my bike from Panama to South Africa. I returned to the UK for February and in March 2011 I flew to South Africa. Starting in Cape Town I took three months (and 9,000 miles) to get to Nairobi.

As well as riding a bike I stopped off and did some voluntary work along the way. In Mexico I worked on a turtle rescue project for two weeks and in Costa Rica at a Sloth Sanctuary for three weeks. In Cape Town I taught for three weeks in a Primary school in a township.

In North America my wife, Tracy, came out for three weeks and also joined me for two months in Central America.

I returned to the UK in June 2011. Although I'd kept a blog (obviously) throughout the trip I honestly had no desire to try to write a book. But that changed. Within days of getting home I started writing. Then in Autumn 2011 I found out about The Ted Simon Foundation and applied to be a Jupiter's Traveller. Unbelievably they accepted me and I starting a whole new, and much more frightening, adventure... Trying to write a book about my trip.

'Gone Riding' was published in November 2013. Signed copies are available direct from me at www.domgiles.co.uk. The book is also on Amazon where you can also get the kindle edition. There is lots more information about my trip and the book on my website where you'll find links to my Facebook page and Twitter account.

I now use this blog to write about my current bike trips. In 2013 we went to Scandinavia for the summer and in 2014 we went to Romania. Summer 2015 was spent solo around the Balkans. In July 2016 I went to Poland, the Baltic and Finland.

In the summer of 2017 we went to Northern Spain and France and in 2018 we went to Ireland.

I sold my bike in January 2019!!!