Setting The Scene

You know how it is, sometimes you say something and it doesn't turn out quite as you expect (I believe "watch this" is the classic example), well early in the year when the beast from the east was still active I said to my wife "How would you like to fly down to Marseille and I'll pick you up there and we can spend a week in the Luberon".

Now this was just my ploy to get her to agree to me having a bike, I didn't expect her to take it seriously - we've been married too long for that.

"That sounds like fun," she replied "have you bought a motorbike?".

Oh, bluff called. "Well, not yet". I explained that I'd only done the CBT & theory tests and still had to do the direct access training and module 1 & 2 tests.

About a week later when I'd just taken the module 1 test she asked me how I'd got on, so I told her that I'd passed. "Good, you had better pass the next one because I've booked a house for 8 days and booked my flights".

Oh. I don't have a licence. I don't have a motorcycle. I don't have any experience of motorcycle touring, but at a particular date and time in the future I need to pick my wife up from an airport 800 miles away. I had better come up with a plan.....

Once I'd bought my Versys and started clocking up the miles parts of the plan started to form in my mind. For the journey down I would take 3 days. Two days on the motorway allowed me to stop in the Vercors for the night, then on day three I would go through the mountains and along D roads to Marseille Airport, pick her up and we'd ride up to the place that we'd rented. Spend a happy week together (or be in the hands of the divorce lawyers), and then I'd take her back to the airport and after spending the night somewhere ride back along the nice roads to the Vercors for a couple of days and then, well when I left home that part of the plan wasn't entirely complete, accommodation wasn't booked etc. But I reckoned that by the time I got down there I would have some of this experience stuff and could firm up the rest of the plan a bit.