Oops! Nearly forgot the photo album

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Tour photos

Cheers

The Stats

 As promised, some stats from the tour.

Total mileage for the tour, 4,559 miles. You will see from the pic, that takes Ginny to just shy of 21,000 miles.

Fuel

Total litres = 392.22

Total gallons = 86.28

Fuel Cost = £509.56

Average MPL / MPG = 11.70  /  53.18

Other Bike Costs

Bridgestone BT23 GT F & R tyres @ 19,622 miles = £261 inc. fitting

800ml BMW Motorrad 5w40 Advantec Engine Oil ≅ £13.00

2 x garage forecourt air line usage = £1.00

Hotels

Number of Hotels = 22

Cost of accommodation / meals = £1319.40

Additional Tour Costs

Ferries, x7 = £30.50

Other tolls / Parking = £2.50

Keeping track of all these costs may seem frivolous but it actually serves a very good purpose and we'd be screwed without my spreadsheet. Being able to log the outlay at the end of each day, made it possible to keep the difference paid between I and Grizzly down to just £86.00 by the end of the tour. Grizzly is not a man who likes to be in debt, so he was constantly on to me to tell him how much he owed. With some hotels auto charging to my card, as the booker, others taking from whichever card was presented on arrival, I had to explain it wouldn't be clear until the last night. IF The Darnley in Ilfracombe could have been bothered, they could have charged Grizzly's card instead of mine, in which case the difference would have been only about £4.00, but then they could hardly drag themselves out of bed in time for our departure!

I think Grizzly would agree, it was another great tour, albeit quite tiring without any layover days. We only experienced rain on 5 or 6 days, so we considered ourselves really lucky, though the times we did get caught in it, it could be very heavy and persistent. Along the way, we had some quite scary moments, most notably the ride from Lynmouth to Porlock in driving rain and thick fog/cloud but also some brilliant ones too, where we both got off the bikes and said "what a great ride that was". Both bikes played up, the Shadslow with its sidestand issue, Ginny with her thirst for oil and the non starting on the last day, but neither of us would change anything of the last 3+ weeks, except maybe the stopover in St Leonards, the Highlands Hotel being, to put not too fine a point on it, a real shithole.

So, that's it for this tour. Next up, a tour of Italy. Grizzly has requested this as his 70th birthday tour, unless one of us wins the lottery, in which case he has his sights set on the US of A.

As always, thanks for taking the time to follow the blog, I hope you got some entertainment out of it and don't forget to look out for the next one. If you've signed up for email updates, then I shall auto enroll your for the Italy / USA tour. If you haven't signed up, why not?, I've told you enough times.   

Cheerio