Off to Scotland

Off to Scotland on Saturday. Tracy and I are taking Heidi up north for a week. Hopefully the weather will be kind, when it is Scotland is a wonderful place. I'd like to get over to the western isles. That's just about the only place I've not been too on a bike, but it depends on the weather. watch this space!

Adventure Bike Rider Magazine

Fifteen months ago, when I was in the UK for a month between Panama and South Africa I bought a copy of Adventure Bike Rider. The last page had a "readers exposed" section where they invited readers to write in. So I did. I sent a few pictures of my North America trip and answered their questions:

Most expensive bike accessory?
Ideal travel partner?
Most dangerous moment?
What do you miss the most when traveling?

That sort of thing.

Then I totally forgot about it. And to be honest I totally forgot about the magazine as well. Then, yesterday at a service station on the M1, I was browsing in WHSmith and saw a copy. I just picked it up and bought it. When I got home I flicked through it and was amazed to see my article on the last page. I had no idea they'd used it. Bit of a shock really. (Mind you - the article says they give you a years free subscription if they use your article and I haven't heard anything from them - so I'm emailing them today!)

As it's May it should be great biking weather - but it just isn't. I'm hoping we get some sort of summer soon. I've got a weeks holiday at the beginning of June and am planning on going somewhere with Heidi - and Tracy. Scotland possibly.

Tom is coming over to the UK this month. Tom is the American I rode though Southern Africa with. He left his V-Strom in Germany last summer and is back in Europe to do a tour this summer. Hopefully he's stopping off with me for a day or two on his way up to Scotlnad at the end of this month.

I have finished my first manuscript. 1000,000 words on North America, and about 60,000 on Africa. I'm not totally happy with it and I know it needs a lot of work but it's a start. Tracy is in the process of reading it through at the moment and when she tells me how crap it is I'll just pack it all in! Or if she says there's hope I'll work on it a little more and then ask for help from the Ted Simon Foundation. It's taken a year to get this far. I wonder how much longer? How much more time?  Actually riding around on a bike was the easy bit. Writing about it is hard. I've developed a whole new found respect for travel writers, that's for sure. Still, the buzz I got from seeing a very small article in a bike magazine by me has given me a liitle spurt of enthusasim. I just can't imagine the excitement I would feel if I ever do actually produce a book.