2013 Welsh National Rally

[mylovelyhorse]

And so the Welsh National Rally is done for another year. Thinking back on it, even at the short distance of a week seems slightly dreamlike - I always miss it after it's gone and immediately look forward to the next one.

The way the rally works is simple - a couple of weeks before the start you get a hand drawn map of Wales with 40 checkpoints listed down the side, each marked with a dot in roughly the right place on the map. There are a fair number of repeated place names in Wales and this helps determine which you're looking for. For the rally you have to visit a number of these and one or more of specified manned checkpoints. There are five awards: Bronze (easiest - 5 checkpoints and 1 manned check), Silver, Gold and Platinum plus the special themed Dragon award. Previous years' Dragon themes have been light railways, abbeys, all sorts of things. This year was war memorials.

You decide the award you're going for and work out a route. I like to have my options open in case of bad weather and so I always do two routes for each award - one in the North and one in the South of Wales.

On the day of the rally you get a list of questions, one per check, such as "at the garage in Trefor, what is the red box for?" Simple proof you've actually been there, really. Can be fun hunting down the right answer

 

[turnipbmw]

glad you enjoyed it !
I was on the Tywyn checkpoint and did the questions for Pembrokeshire.
Any good photos ?
Will put them on the CliveMcc website

 

[mylovelyhorse]

Here's the rest of the post that went missing earlier....

This year the wife decided to do the rally as pillion and so we only took the GS to Wales. We try to always go a day early to have a relaxation day before the rally and this year was no exception. Thursday was, you might recall, plagued with very high winds and heavy rain, so the trip up to the village of Forden (where we always stay in the same excellent B&B / smallholding) was a bit fun. As I said in another post it turns out that a fully loaded GS with luggage & pillion is a bit of a handful in a strong side-wind. I became quite practised at riding straight (ish) with the bike leant over. Compensating for changes as we went past lorries was a laugh too - we didn't end up in the 3rd lane more than about twice, but only just...

On the Friday we took a 7 mile walk over a local mountain with our B&B's very well behaved and very bouncy 2-year-old border collie. Very tiring, very enjoyable and the rain held off until we got back, thank goodness.

Saturday morning was grey, with heavy clouds but wasn't actually raining as we made our way to the start. We had decided to try for the Platinum award - 15 scattered questions to answer, 3 manned checkpoints to attend and 4 extra questions about war memorials for the Dragon award (compulsory for Platinum, optional for all other awards).

There were about 400 riders entered this year, more than last year but way down on the 750+ when I first started doing the rally in 2000 or 2001 so the signing in queues weren't too long. I only saw one other F800GS in the car park at the start. Pity - it's the perfect bike for it.

We got away at about 08:45 heading North. The rain didn't start for at least 45 minutes...

We had a very pleasurable ride, despite the intermittent rain. Over the day we probably had six long periods of rain, each followed by long enough periods to dry out. Frankly this just demonstrated quite how good the GS and modern rider equipment, tyres, heated grips etc actually are. We were both warm and dry despite the soakings, there were one or two very minor twitches from the back end on some of the muddiest, steepest, tiniest roads - nothing to worry about though and some of those roads were really, really sh*tty.

In previous years there have been all sorts of problems with clues - e.g. places not known by the given name any more - but these days that sort of nonsense has been eliminated. The only one that gave us a little grief was one that could have been sorted prior to the event if I had applied some lateral thinking when setting the route (but then I'm not known for that). Basically most checkpoints are villages of towns. This one was a lake and so I just picked a car park by the side of it for my GPS way point. Didn't occur to me to google the visitor's centre... D'oh!

We stopped on the front at Twywn for the last manned checkpoint at around 17:45. A good long stop there for hot drinks and warm food refreshed us before we set off for the last 1/2 a dozen checks. Clearly this fogged my brain because I then made a nav error that cost us a fair bit of time and ~25 miles. As a result we finished much later than I had intended.

We got back to our B&B at about 10, utterly knackered but after a great day's riding & rallying, having covered 401 rally miles. The following day we came home in more high winds and heavy rain. 825 miles in total for our long weekend away 

The bike now has 17,250 miles on the clock and will be in for a new chain & sprockets and the 18k service soon...

The Welsh National Rally. Heartily recommended 

 

[mylovelyhorse]

glad you enjoyed it !
I was on the Tywyn checkpoint

Wereyou? How was the sailing? Wet going South on Sunday wasn't it?

and did the questions for Pembrokeshire.

Did you? I shall be checking them later to see if there were any dodgy ones

Any good photos ?
Will put them on the CliveMcc website :

Dunno, I'll check and let you know. Probably not, I'm afraid.

 

[Aidan1150]

The Welsh National Rally. Heartily recommended 

Absolutely.

Four of us went over and did it a couple of years ago and we will do it again, when other shite doesn't get in the way. It really is a cracking event.

 

[turnipbmw]

Wereyou? How was the sailing? Wet going South on Sunday wasn't it?


Did you? I shall be checking them later to see if there were any dodgy ones


Dunno, I'll check and let you know. Probably not, I'm afraid.

Brilliant thanks - did the explosion museum on way then ended up staying on boat in Cowes. - weather far better than forecast.

 

[mylovelyhorse]

Brilliant thanks - did the explosion museum on way then ended up staying on boat in Cowes. - weather far better than forecast.

I'm very happy to hear it!

Glad you enjoyed the explosions museum - we've some crackers round here. Ping me a PM if you come back down and we'll put the coffee pot on

m

posting here instead of going out and riding my f800gs