Normandy 2009
We are back home, we have finished our monster trip succesfully.
We have covered almost 1300 miles in just seven days, you may imagine that some parts of our body was terribly acking.
Our event was planned to start tuesday morning the second of june but the saturday before I got an urgent call from one of
the fellow riders that he has cracked his gearbox shell of his Triumph 3SW so we decided that he could ride mine 3SW.
Mine own Triumph was inspected recently and we discoverd that the wheel bearing of the rear wheel where in a poor condition but
still useable. Inspection of the front wheel bearing in monday evening learned that one of the original Timkin bearings has
given up some time ago, a replacement was desperatly needed and so we used the bearings of Jork's Triumph. Picture left: our bikes
at the start of our adventure.
Now the bearings are replaced by metric SKF bearings, I will put an article on the site soon how we did this.
Tuesday 2nd of june we covered over 300 miles without any serious trouble exept for avoiding loosing luguage.
Just for entering the Tunnel (crossing the Schelde, lenght about 4 mile) I lost part of my luguage, 6 cans of Palm beer and
a bottle of drinking water. The second day we travelled for another 220 miles to arrive at dinnertime at our campsite.
We covered 520 miles in 2 day, we were riding our bikes for 22 hours, that makes a average speed of 37 km/h or 23 miles/hour.
This is our campsite
We spend our time well in Normandy, there where almost more Triumphs there as there where Nortons, we counted 6 or 7 Nortons
at the 6th of June. The world record attempt was impressing and so was the beach at Arromanches.
On the beach at Arromanche
On our jouney back home we suffered from rain; we didn't make it to the Belgium border, our goal was West-Vleteren to buy a beer
but the rain made us stop in France, about 60 miles from the Belgium border.
The second day the weather has cleared and with excelent motorcycle weather we rode our bikes home.
It was a fantastic experience, so I hope to return for the 70th anniversary.
