A mini adventure with Trailquest

I had taken quite a few short excursions off road on my Bonneville whilst on day or week trips in Thailand, but the Bonnie is a low, easily managable bike and I was always travelling very light.   The big trip will present much bigger challenges with a bigger bike & lots of lugggage. Time for some training to learn some of the basic skills for handling a big heavy bike on rough terrain.

There are a few organisations around in the UK that do this, I picked Trailquest, based near Hereford on the welsh borders.  They use Triumph Tigers for the training, so spot on the mark in my case.

I did an inital one day course with them in April enjoyed it immensley & found it very helpful. Most of the day was on one of their bikes, but the last hour was on mine, so I got a feel for the difference of a loaded bike as I had my panniers on.

I booked a second day, a 'mini adventure', in the hills & woodland near Leominster, to consolidate the learning, take it on a bit further and test my final bike setup. That day was today and I decided to do it all on my own bike, fully loaded.

So yesterday I packed my gear and headed off to spend a night camping under the stars, on a nice little site near Mortimers Cross.

This particular site had a few resident cute animals who managed to wake me up a few times in the night with their munching!


 

The training day itself was great fun and again very instructive - Richard & his team there run a very professional operation.

The format is basically to look at a particular challenge along the route, discuss how to tackle it, follow him doing it, then repeat alone until confident.

Once the different sections have been mastered then its time to do the full course with the trainer following to pick up the pieces.

I had a few hairy moments on wet grass/muddy ruts which would have made Torvill & Dean proud, but managed to stay on the bike throughout.

At the end of the day I was pretty wacked, but in a good way & rode the 2 hours home with a renewed confidence in my & my trusty steed's capabilities.

Job done!