Wolf in France

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sv-wolf
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Real Name: Richard
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Wolf in France

#1 Unread post by sv-wolf »

Wolf in France

It’s been a couple of months now since I got back from France and I didn’t keep a diary this time, so I’m posting what I remember now. I’ll add detail later as it comes back to me. Day 1 has been transferred here from my main blog. The new stuff is from Day 2 onwards.


Day 1

It had been a tricky start. I'd got the tyres on the Daytona changed the day before I set out but hadn't had time to take the bike to a motorcycle dealer to get them torqued up. On the way down to Dover and the ferry I'd stopped off in Maidstone and spent a half-hour trying to locate a Triumph dealer I knew to be there. I'm glad I did, because after he'd taken a spanner to my rear wheel, he told me that it was nowhere near tight enough. I'm glad, but it made me late and I missed my ferry by ten minutes. That wasn't the end of the world as I had transferrable tickets, but I was eager to get going and I got impatient hanging around.

A few hours later I was riding the Daytona down the coast road from Calais to Abbeyville, before turning off towards Rouen. There was no fumbling for money or tickets at the toll booth this time. And there was no mist over the Somme - a very good omen. Things were going well, I thought. But that thought is usually a prelude to something going wrong. I had forgotten something - I'd forgotten just how far it was between service stations on this stretch of motorway.

As I passed a service station, a little anxiety-thought passed through my head, that maybe I should have pulled in and fuelled up. As a reflex I glanced down at my dash - just in time to see the reserve light blink on. Damn! That meant I had about 35 miles worth of fuel left in the tank. Ahead of me, the great bleak emptiness that is northern France stretched endlessly towards the horizon. And then it was that I remembered something else. A lot of the petrol pumps on this stretch of road are automatic. But I needed to find a manned one, as British credit cards rarely work in French automatic petrol pumps. (The British banking system thought it could cut corners and produce a cheaper card than the rest of Europe. Whoops! All very well until you try to use yours in some European card readers.)

Thirty-one miles later, there was still no sign of a service station. At that point my nerve gave way and I turned off the motorway in the middle of a wet, green nowhere, and put my trust in luck. No, that's not true. Trust was not on the menu. At that molment I was one little bundle of anxiety and p1ssed-offness. My mood was made all the worse for having had an argument with a disembodied voice at the toll booth as I came off the autoroute. I tried to get the voice to tell me if there was a service station nearby. But all the voice wanted was my money. The voice won. Whoever the owner of the voice was, I pity her family.

But, call it luck if you will - after leaving the autoroute I rounded a corner and found a little roadside settlement; a dismal one-horse village, but a village with a petrol pump. I managed to put nearly eighteen litres into a nominally seventeen litre tank. As I was filling up a wedding party went by - a stream of cars with white bunting attached all over them and yelling occupants. I decided to think of it as another good omen, but I knew I was trying hard now.

At Rouen I took a break to eat a meal at a pavement café in the city’s medieval centre, close to the cathedral, and tried to enjoy the particular sensation of being in France. I tried hard, but my main interest was in my stomach and finding a campsite for the night.

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Rouen cathedral with its ugly nineteenth-century wrought iron spire.

Ordering the meal was something of a drama. Try to explain in English to an instinctively bored waitress that you have an unusual and complex range of food allergies which could seriously impede your ability to ride your motorcycle, and you are plunged into the middle of a strange game, something half-way between a fight to the death and a diplomatic mission. Try to explain this in a foreign language to a French waitress in whom an attitude of boredom has been brought to a peak of sophistication, and it can turn into a nightmare of uncertainty and misunderstanding.

It didn't go easily. It usually takes me a day or so to relax into speaking French whenever I cross The Channel and on this occasion my tongue proved very rusty indeed. The words were slow in coming. It took some sweat: I managed to explain what I couldn’t eat, but wasn’t as successful with the things I could. I ended up with a small plate of cold, dyed haddock and a teaspoonful of rice, all topped off with a tiny froth of green salad. A slug would have perished trying to survive on rations like that. Fortunately I had a semi-squashed banana in my tank bag and filled myself up on that as I walked back to my bike.

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A view of part of the medieval centre of Rouen from the café.

Beyond Rouen, the motorways I had been using headed off in the wrong direction, so I took to the local roads and continued my journey southwards towards Evreux and Dreux. My final destination was the Pyrenees and the sunny south of France. At least, I hoped it was going to be sunny, because right then, the Northern part of the country was as grey and clammy as the grey and clammy island I had so recently left on the other side of The Channel.

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Rouen again

At first, the roads were narrow and congested. By about half-past-seven I was still only 40 or so miles south of Rouen and the light was beginning to fade. I needed to find a base for the night and started to look out for a place to camp. I came across several road signs pointing out likely looking sites, but the sites themselves were shy about revealing themselves. When I did manage to find them, their gates were barred and they were shrouded in an impenetrable darkness. Sigh! Even though it was nearing the end of the unreasonably short French camping there should have been some campsites still open. I needed to find one soon. I didn’t care whether it was open for business or closed - so long as I could get through its gates on the bike. I needed to find one soon because once I crossed the river I would be heading off into the even greater emptiness around Chatres. And in that godforsaken region I would be unlikely to find a spark of human life, let alone a campsite.

I was getting tired My enthusiasm for the trip was beginning to dwindle. But that was all par for the course on the first day. I was beginning to think I would have to make do with a field, and, in France, that is not as easy as it sounds. In France, you have to keep well out of sight because ‘camping sauvage’ is illegal. But for the moment, I kept on looking for that elusive site.

I eventually hauled up in a little town, whose name and whereabouts were and still are a complete mystery to me. I had strayed so far off my route by that time that my sense of direction was completely f*cked (‘scuse my French!). I parked the bike and went into a burgher bar to ask for advice. ‘Pardon monsieur’, I began, as I entered, j’ai une probleme.’ That’s always a good start. The French love solving problems, especially other people’s. ‘Pouvez-vous m’aidez:’ I was laying it on a bit thick here, I realised! And the kids in the bar were not the formally polite French of yesteryear. There were about half-a-dozen of them; surly teenagers with enough collective angst to give themselves acid stomachs for a month. Contemptuously, they informed me that there was no campsite in or around the town but there was a hotel at the bottom of the road. Oh well! I thought. That would probably have to do.

It took me about twenty minutes to find the bloody hotel. It was only a couple of hundred yards away but in a quite different direction from the instructions I’d been given . I parked on the road outside it and began to detatch my brand new tank bag. The fob on the zip broke off as I tugged at it, so the operation took longer than it should. As I worked I noticed that opposite the hotel was a tall hedge and beyond the hedge was what looked like… Hang on a minute! Weren’t those caravans parked over there. I crossed the road to get a better look, and yep, there were caravans parked on what looked very much like a municipal campsite. I cast about for the entrance.

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Next morning. The campsite with the medieval town rising up above it.

Just up the road, across a busy car-park, there was a noisy bar. Outside the bar a televised rugby match was being projected onto a large outdoor screen. I listened to the commentary for a few moments: France was playing Ireland. And from the cheers and the sudden, rowdy bursts of the Marseillaise among the bar’s customers, I gathered that France was doing quite well.

[Got to have an aside here - Has anybody ever worked out the words to the Marseillaise, the French national anthem? It’s got to be just about the goriest and bloodiest national song I’ve ever heard. It is all about having a damn good time hacking your enemies to pieces and spraying their blood on the ground as you march on to victory - that sort of thing. (Dear old Rouget de Lille must have seen an advance copy of ‘300’.) French chauvinism clearly holds no brief for self-restraint. That put me in mind of own dear national anthem and particularly the second verse (which fortunately no-one ever sings). It too, damns the nation’s enemies but merely expresses a pious hope that the monarch will ‘confound their knavish tricks,’ (I think it is the monarch who is supposed to do the ‘confounding’, but it might be god, I can’t remember – but what’s the difference, anyway!). This, of course, suggests that we Brits are a lot of jolly good chaps who haven’t got a knavish or tricksy bone in our patriotic bodies – heaven forfend!. And it all adds up to a much more measured and British sentiment, of course, which is all the more enjoyable because it is just plain silly.]

As I was poking around outside the empty campsite office, the campsite attendant came running over from the bar, still flushed with patriotic fervour. Consider this: he’d been watching his national team defeat the Irish in a game invented to train British ‘gentlemen’ (the historical enemy) in the running of the empire. (If you are unfamiliar with rugby, just imagine American football played without padding or helmets, and with far less stop-go action.). The chap expressed admiration for my bike, took my money (a few Euros) and in I went, while he hurried back across the car-park to resume his dreams of bloody victory.

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The river next to the campsite the next morning

About an hour later, I had got the tent up and was cooking supper on my camping stove. I would normally be closing this narrative by now but at that moment three French lads came over to inspect the Daytona. They were quite impressed, despite the fact that it was a British marque. We got to chatting about bikes. I mention this incident only because one of them, trying out his English on me, suddenly remarked with obvious interest that I had a ‘flashy arse.’ I was just getting ready to run for it when I realised he was referring to the tail-light on my bike. The alarm on the Daytona is hooked up to it so that it flashes every few seconds, warning people not to touch. At that moment, it was a sentiment I shared exactly.

After supper I settled down to work out my route down south. There is no convenient way to get to the south of France from the Channel Ports by motorway without circumnavigating the French capital on the Peripherique. Ah! The Peripherique! If London’s M25 is the most boring ring road in Europe, then the Peripherique, which circles Paris like a tight belt, is the most madcap. Riding the Peripherique is only an option if you are intent on testing your survival skills.

The alternative way south is to swing out west from Calais towards Rouen, then orbit the capital at a good distance, making sure you are not sucked into its intense gravitational pull. Once you are south-west of the city and heading for Orleans, you can pick up the motorway network again. After that, it is a straight run all the way to the southern border. The disadvantage of using this route is that it takes you across the tedious emptiness the North European Plain, which is made even more tedious and empty by a ruthless agri-business that has grubbed up almost every hedgerow, tree and coppice in this once green land, leaving the whole region utterly flat, bare and denuded of interest.

But there are compensations: there is Rouen, for example. Rouen is like an old friend: a lovely, easy-going old city which retains its medieval heart. It is a great city to explore, once you know where to look. It’s a deceptive place. Your first impressions are likely to be disappointing. The main arterial roads entering Rouen will inevitably guide you down to the River Seine. Unfortunately, the riverside embankments, usually an attractive focal point of European towns, are bleak and uninteresting. But take a short walk away from the river and there is a lot to discover, from medieval timber-frame houses to more recent buildings that make you realise that the human imagination is not yet quite dead.

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Rouen

Beyond Rouen, there are other places of interest. Evreux and Dreux have attractive historical centres. And after Dreux, just as the empty, sunswept miles are beginning to weigh heavily on your mind, you top a long, low rise, and are suddenly confronted by a single silhouetted form standing out against the horizon - Chartres cathedral. For a long time, you cannot see the city that surrounds it. The building is the sole discernible object from one horizon to the other. And in September, in the weeks following the harvest, its great spires soar skywards out of the middle of an enormous, ocean of pure gold.

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The cathedral at Evreux

I was tempted to stop and make a visit, but I wanted to get south as quickly as I could. Still, I was sad to miss the opportunity. Chartres cathedral is one of the great wonders of our world, a building of staggering power and beauty – and meaning. The cathedral is an enormous book, whose every architectural detail was devised according to the requirements of a medieval ‘sacred mathematics.’ It is a huge narration in stone and glass of the Christian myth, open for anyone to read it – if only he knows the language. The medieval masons are great heroes of mine. I wish I understood them better. And I had a personal reason to stop as well. Di and I had visited the cathedral early in our relationship. Di had wanted to walk the maze laid out upon its floor, but it had been covered over the day we went. The maze, too, is full of coded meanings. But perhaps the memory of that earlier visit was another reason why I passed on by. Some things are just too painful.

Beyond Chartres you eventually hit the A10, and from there it is a straight run right down to the south. But then, two options open themselves to you: you can either follow the A10/A20 straight down through Limoges, or you can peel off onto the A71/A75 down through Claremont Ferrand. As I was heading for the Pyrenees, the A20 would have been my most direct route. But as the A75 passes through the Auvergne and is the most beautiful and magnificent major road every conceived by the mind of man, my choice was a foregone conculsion.

Day 2

Down to Claremont Ferrand in the Auvergne. Not much to report today. I stopped off at Evreux for lunch then carried on down through Orleans (second lunch at a motorway stop outside the city) and on to Claremont. From Orleans down to Claremont it was wet and windy - and as the miles went by it got wetter and windier. As the weather deteriorated my intentions to find a campsite faded. In the end I put up at an expensive service-stop hotel just north of Claremont. But I couldn’t care less. I dripped all over the lobby and then dripped down the corridor to my room and then crashed out, glad to stop and glad to be dry.

Day 3

I’d been looking forward to picking up the A75 just south of Claremont, which is one of the most magnificent roads I have ever ridden – a stupendous curving highway through some of the most beautiful mountain scenery on the continent. But somehow, at the last minute I changed my mind and headed west across the Volcanic region of the Auvergne. It was a perverse decision. As I got up into the hills beyond Claremont the mist came down and obscured everything. I could only see a few feet in front of me. But what the hell, I was enjoying myself. Being lost and secluded somehow puts me on my mettle and I began to enjoy the challenge. And this is proper wild country. I was heading out towards Mont Dore which I’d visited a couple of years ago but lost my way in the mist. Eventually, I swung off when I saw a sign for the A89.

As I came down from the high mountains onto the A89, the mist cleared and a wide sunshiny sky opened up above. The A89 is a major dual-carriageway that runs east west and joins the two major north-south routes through France (the A75 and the A20). What a road! It’s very different from the A75 but if anything even more spectacular. Like the A75 it travels through mountainous country, but whereas the 75 is craggy and undulating, the landscape surrounding the 89 is almost completely forested. That’s one thing we don’t have much of in the UK – forests. And unlike the 75 the 89 is almost completely deserted. In my whole trip I must have seen just a few dozen other vehicles. It’s a major motorway with almost no motors. An exhilarating journey!

After the A68, I turned south onto the A20, for a while, but soon got fed up with motorway riding and headed out into the neighbouring countryside. The landscape around here is broad and open. There are plenty of lazy, sweeping roads where you can just relax and enjoy the bike. It put me into a very good mood which lasted for the rest of the day. I stopped off at Cahors for a drink. Cahors, like many French towns has a scruffy exterior but a very attractive centre, packed with tree-lined roads and boulevards, and fully of very laid-back, attractive squares.

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A street in the centre of Cahors

Ron met me about ten miles from St Antonin Noble Val where he had been staying. We would hang out there for a couple of days as guests of his nephew and his newphew’s wife. They have lived down here for several years. The road into St Antonin followed the side of a winding valley. And what a great road it was to ride. It followed the course of an old abandoned railway track, so there were no steep gradients, and the curves (one after the other without a break) were broad with no sudden surprises. You could keep a high steady speed throughout its entire length.

We came into St Antonin at nightfall. It’s an attractive old town built low in a rocky gorge, with a broad, attractive river flowing past it.

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St Antonin Noble Val

Day 4

We took a walk through the village in the morning and rode the local roads in the afternoon: high level and low level - all spectacular.

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A hilltop castle in a village near St Antonin

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Day 5

After a lazy morning eating breakfast on the veranda overlooking the valley we set of south towards the Pyrenees. We headed for Albi and then struck off on minor D roads, keeping away from traffic and centres of population as much as possible. Most of the roads we found were mountain twisties running through the forest and river regions east of Castres. This is really gorgeous countryside and back-road heaven on a bike.

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One of many villages in these steep valleys, spanned inevitably by a stone bridge

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A riverside chateau bombed out during the Second World War

We were heading for Minerve, an ancient village built on a massive pillar of rock between two gorges. We’d planned on getting something to eat there and staying there the night, but when we arrived there didn’t appear to be much on offer, either in the way of food or of accommodation. The town was so small and the streets so twisting and narrow that only residents were allowed to bring their vehicles into the village proper.



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Minevre


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The gorges at Minevre

We left Minevre and carried on down to Olonzac where we found a bar-hotel, and there we stayed the night. That evening we ate in a local restaurant just off a deserted square in the town centre. The service was superb. The food was better. Two good reasons among many to come holidaying in France.

Day 6-8

After breakfast in the Hotel/bar we set off on the bikes, skirted Carcasonne, and headed off down to Limoux. The roads were busy, noisy and not very pleasant to ride, but they got us south quickly. Beyond Limoux we left the traffic and the fumes and headed out again into the countryside towards Chalabre where the rain started to come down, and from there we trekked up into the Pyrenees.

I don’t recall the exact sequence of things after that. We took any road that looked twisty, interesting, mountainous or led to a couple of the sites we wanted to visit. We visted Perepeteuse, one of the medieval mountain-top castles that were used to defend the Spanish/French border (until the border was moved, leaving the now-purposeless castles to fall into ruin). We visited Mont Ségur (Mount Secure) the very last stronghold of the Cathars before they were finally butchered. Mont Ségur is one of those sites who’s role in history is responsible for the whole mythology of the Holy Grail and for the colossal bank balance now in the name of Mr Dan Brown. And we visited Montaillou.

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The mountain fortress of Perepeteuse

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Looking out across the valley from the fortress

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Mont Ségur (Mount Secure - no kidding!)

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Mountain scenery near Prades

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Mountain gorges on the way back from Peyrepeteuse

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A ‘hermitage’ half way down a cliff


Visiting Montaillou was a high point for me, something I’d wanted to do for thirty years. It all started with a book I had read with the same name in the 1970s. I’d picked the book up in a sale in Hull. It was a book on medieval history, but it was a book with a difference. So different was it from most other history books that it became a best seller in France during those years.

Today, the tiny hilltop village of Montaillou is surrounded by bleak windswept fields and hillside pastures, looking very much as it must have done back in the 13th century. Back in those days the whole region was suffering from the dynastic squabbles between the local independent nobles and the French crown. Its ‘heretical’ Cathar population was also being persecuted by the Catholic Church.

South-west France and north-west Spain became a major centre of the Catholic inquisition. The Catholic inquisitor in Montaillou seems to have been particularly industrious. He documented the lives of every one of the villagers in immense detail. He noted their beliefs and opinions, their habits and preferences, their movements, their wealth (or poverty) and their work. He noted who was related to whom, who was indebted to whom and even who was bonking whom. He described their personalities, their conversation – just about everything. And when this record came to light in the 1960s it changed the way historians understood the life of the Middle Ages.

Basing itself upon these documents, the book, ‘Montaillou’ introduces you to the villagers. One by one they come alive in its pages. It’s more like a novel than a piece of research. The book is a time warp. Reading it, you come face-to-face with a group of people who finished their lives over 700 years ago but who might just as well have stepped off a number 19 bus down the road. Though their society is very different to ours, they, themselves are wholly recognisable.

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Yours truly

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Goodbye France (Calais)

On the way back across the Channel, the ferry passed Jason Lewis powering his way across the narrow strip of water in his pedal boat, Moshka. Passengers on the ferry hurried up on deck to get photographs. He is on his way home to Dorset. He is completing the very last stages of his round-the-world ‘human-powered’ trek. He left Britain in 1994 and has been at it ever since: walking; swimming; travelling by kayak, mountain bike, roller blades and pedal boat. He used his pedal boat to cross the Atlantic, the Pacific and part of the Indian Ocean. Astounding! The guy is the very best kind of nut. What an extraordinary thing to do! I’ve been following the reports on him for the last few years, so I was excited to catch a glimpse of him on the final stage of his journey.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Karl Bushby too, who is doing what he believes is the longest walk in human history, starting at the tip of South America, then travelling up the pan-am highway to Canada, across the frozen ice of the Bearing Strait to Russia, through Russia to Europe and then home to Britain through a service duct of the Channel Tunnel. He is currently slogging it out through Russia. He made it through the Darien gap avoiding government troops and militias by paddling down rivers tied to a log. Bushby started out without any serious sponsorship at all and was largely funded for the American half of his trip by a whip-round that his mother did every week at the factory where she worked. Everyone loves off-the-wall guys like these. It makes life worth living to know that someone is out there somewhere doing something so adventuresome and totally purposeless. Gladdens my heart, it does.


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Jason Lewis in his pedal boat (the yellow vessel), less than a mile out from Dover, on the very last leg of his round the world trip

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Hello England (Dover)

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My most enduring memory of the trip was this view of Pic du Canigou

To be continued…
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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blues2cruise
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#2 Unread post by blues2cruise »

To be contniued when?

I loved the scenic tour. Thanks.
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sv-wolf
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#3 Unread post by sv-wolf »

Hi Blues

Wow! where did you dig this one up from? You must have been dredging through the oldies to find it. I'd already begun to forget some of the detail and intended to add it in as it came back to me, but, as usual I ran out of steam.

I've just written another long blog - going up in a couple of days. The experience made me finally realise I can't keep this up. My posts in future will be a lot shorter - that's a resolution. I'm sure people just skim them anyway. Life's too short.
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

Shorts
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#4 Unread post by Shorts »

Wow, great read with my morning coffee :coffeetime:


Looking at the date, it has been a little while huh?

Well anyway, it was new to me. Beautiful pictures - made me want to go travel some more. Oh and it's got to be flattering that people notice your flashy arse :mrgreen:

blues2cruise
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#5 Unread post by blues2cruise »

I found this thread because I was looking for my own about the road trip I did....I saw yours and realized that I had never seen it before.

If you like writing, why worry about shortening the posts?
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#6 Unread post by jstark47 »

blues2cruise wrote:To be contniued when?
Sometime AFTER he finishes the #$**@#!!! Four Corners Blog!!!!! :evil:
2003 Triumph Trophy 1200
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blues2cruise
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#7 Unread post by blues2cruise »

jstark47 wrote:
blues2cruise wrote:To be contniued when?
Sometime AFTER he finishes the #$**@#!!! Four Corners Blog!!!!! :evil:
:laughing: :laughing: :laughing:
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