The fall out

For the first time since my trip to New Zealand, the motorcycle touring bug had bitten deeply. The question was what was I to do about it?

Firstly there was the question of the bike. My Triumph Speed Triple had been admirable on the Sardinia round trip, but the mileage was now racking up on my PCP financed bike. It had already been to the Isle of Man TT and on a fair few camping weekends, as well as being my main form of transport. At a little over a year old, the mileage was heading over the 9,000 mark.

There's no physical or mechanical problem with that. The bike has a very understressed engine and I have no doubt it could take high mileages extremely easily. The problem with it relates to the residual value of, what would be perceived as, a high mileage bike and the knock on effect on the PCP agreement. I'm not going to go into the details of vehicle financing packages, but with the aim of ramping up the bike touring, the financing was going to become a problem which would eventually bite hard. I decided to chop in my Speed Triple for a bike which people expect to run high mileages and change from PCP to HP at the same time. Both of these choices made sense to me - and still do. It was the logical thing to do. Having managed to dent the rims of both of the alloy wheels on the Speed Triple, once due to a lump of masonry in the road which I couldn't avoid and once because of a high speed blowout on the motorway, I wanted a bike with tough, wire spoked wheels. This was handy because I also wanted a 'go anywhere bike' and the more serious ones of those come with that type of wheel, for good reasons.

So a go anywhere bike which is good for racking up long distances, that basically means an 'adventure bike'. I had no interest in the big bikes, BMW GS1200, KTM1190, Triumph Explorer et al. They are so heavy, cumbersome at low speed and bulky that I fail to see the attraction. I wanted a middle weight bike for my purposes. Back in the day, before buying the Speed Triple, I had test ridden the Triumph Tiger 800 and my abiding memory of that test ride was thinking 'I could ride around the world on this'. With the next generation of Tiger 800 now on the market, an obvious choice was to take the new one for a ride and see what it was like. As I was after a wire wheeled rufty tufty bike, I would need the XC version. My friendly local Triumph dealer, Fowlers of Bristol, gave me their demo Tiger XCx for a couple of hours to see what I thought. That was long enough for me to go over the bridge in to Wales and give it a decent test. In a couple of hours I managed motorways, large A roads, twisty A and B roads, single track country lanes and even a bit of gravel track. In every situation I thought the bike was superb and the level of comfort was a revelation after the Speed Triple. As it was the XCx version, the bike came with a extra few bells and whistles, including cruise control. Surprisingly, no heated grips though.

A few days of head scratching followed the test ride. I spoke to Fowlers about chopping in my bike against a Tiger 800 XCx, but due to the mileage the equity in my bike was relatively low. I could always pretty much moth ball the Speed Triple for the winter, by which time the mileage versus age ratio would have swung a little further back in my favour. As it was, I happened to ask Fowlers when their demo XCx would be up for replacement. As it also was, their replacement demo was in the process of being ordered and their current demo would soon be up for sale! A deal was swiftly struck, my lovely Speed Triple traded in and an equally lovely Tiger 800 XCx left Fowlers a little earlier than they had been planned! I had also swapped from PCP to HP, so in 5 years the bike would be completely paid off.

And so begun my 'adventure bike' ownership. Having spent many years with haphazard bungees holding an assortment of so called luggage on to bikes, the lack of panniers etc didn't bother me. I got my trusty Rok Straps and roll bag out, put them onto my new bike - which actually had proper bungee points on it - and cracked in a few camping weekends away before the winter really set in.