Dragon Rally 2007
Words and Photos By Ian Vessey
We sailed through Jan 07 in lovely dryish, warmish weather, and guess what, two days before the Dragon Rally, winter arrives. The Forest of Dean is totally cut off by snow on the Friday evening and I and many others got caught on the way home. Luckily for me, I wasn't too far from my brother-in-law's, so I spent a few hours there watching DVDs until about 9pm, when the roads miraculously started to clear and I was able to return to the van and go home.
This meant a later than planned start on Saturday, especially since I discovered that the battery had died on the XT, so I had to dig out the CCM - swap handlebar muffs over etc.. Glen and Ian Beard were supposed to be coming but chickened out, so that left myself and Kev to brave the elements. I met up with Kev at Ross just past 11:30, and we headed off.
We took the easiest route up to Shrewsbury and over the mountains using the A5 to Anglesey. All the roads were clear, and we had a nice steady easy ride all the way. The only mechanical problem we had was a misfire on Kev's XT, which he identified by Hereford as being his handlebar muffs touching the kill switch!
The only other problem was the CCM seat. Nothing technically wrong with it as such, it's just not really designed to be sat on for any distance (or sat on at all for that matter), and my tent was occupying the back half which didn't help either. The cloud was low over Snowdonia, but the views were still impressive, and as we arrived at Bangor, we rode into brilliant sunshine and blue skies. The views of the mountains from Anglesey were spectacular.
On site we met a whole bunch of familiar faces, friends from Gloucester and Worcester who we had originaly planned to meet and ride up with. Also there was Andrew Weddle who had ridden up on the 250 CZ that he had used to tackle the Snowrun with the previous weekend - just put a bigger front sprocket on! Also onsite was Yoshi who made an attempt to extract a Wyegate entry, but to no avail. The rest of the evening is a bit of a blurr, something to do with bottles of Hobgoblin and Brains bitter...........
So far so good, but then later in the evening it started to rain, and it was chucking it down in the night which was a bit ominous. But in the morning, we arose about 8am to glorious sunshine and blue skies again. We had decamped by 10 and took a detour on the way back up Llanberis pass, and across the top back to the A5 at Capel Curig and were rewarded with some stunning views of the scenery.
The ride back home was dry and uneventful and sunny! It only started raining after I got home and set up the jetwash to clean the bike - excellent timing then!
Does anyone know where I can get a comfy seat for a CCM........