Even here. We had many miles of empty roads on Sunday. If one knows where to go there is still solitude to be had whilst riding.
I wonder how many of us keep our very favourite places to ourselves in these days of social media?
- Thread starter Wapping
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I’d say it’s the opposite . Modern bikes with Euro 5+ emissions are much quieter than older bikes .
A few weeks ago we had a 3 day break in the Cotswolds and went further down the Fosse than our usual destination of Bourton on the Water. At places like Tetbury and Castle Coombe we couldn't find a place to park the bikes due to the hoards of tourists and we didn't even bother trying to get through Bibery because Google Maps showed gridlock all around. Never again.
Quiet bikes save beautiful places
Although the Akra on my Tenere 700 is a bit quieter than the stock can from Yamaha….bizarrely
I prefer stealthy too and trundle through towns & villages, on a trailing throttle where I can
Until someone (all but inevitably) rips off the exhaust / catalytic system and installs a bellowing howling monster in their place. Yup, they come off the production line fully (or pretty much) compliant, but very few will stay that way. Even scooters get the ‘Akra treatment’.
I was in the Cotswolds in late August for a wedding
We stayed near Burford
It was busy
On the preceding day we went to Bourton and it was like Blackpool
We had to park in a field for a fiver
Yet after the madding crowds, we walked around a Wildlife Trust nature reserve about 200 yds from the field car park
The walk through the fields and woods was totally deserted
Yet 1/4 mile away it was bedlam in the town
Folk are funny …aren’t they
You mean like the £5500 Akra on my X-Diavel ( that I didn’t fit ) ?
You mean like the £5500 Akra on my X-Diavel ( that I didn’t fit ) ?
There is always an exception that proves the rule.
ThreeDawg
Registered user
I was thinking much the same about the very analogue 1100.
In theory, amongst the ‘greenest’ ways to travel on a motorcycle. Its build carbon footprint went years ago.
Hmm, bigger bikes like 1300 GSs seem to have a real bassy noise (done with the exhaust flap maybe?). Ditto T7s and the like. My bike sounds pathetic by comparison.
. I know that sports bikes howling through the Dales to Hawes seriously piss off people, and the sort of people who get pissed off can sometimes do something about it.
They’ll still be compliant, from the factory gate.
A lot of years ago I recommended a hotel on another forum , we had used it for years with zero issues and despite it now being closed we are still friends with it's now retired owner.
We were talking to her the following summer when we visited and she mentioned a group of "UK bikers" who had stayed as a result of my recommendation and that they had been a complete pain in the @rse due to their drunken behaviour and general behaviour.
Now I am loathed to recommend places
We were talking to her the following summer when we visited and she mentioned a group of "UK bikers" who had stayed as a result of my recommendation and that they had been a complete pain in the @rse due to their drunken behaviour and general behaviour.
Now I am loathed to recommend places
That’s really sad to hear. You would have hoped that people would generally behave….
That’s got me thinking now as well….
I would not recommend specific places because of incidents like this. A generic recommendation of an area but not a particular hotel, Inn etc.
we all have different expectations, particularly on here so it’s best to keep one’s good places to oneself. For instance my lad has a 5 bedroom air B&B in the Alps but I won’t be recommending it on here.
there is a risk that a bunch of cúnts will see a review and go to a place one recommends but for me, I like to promote places I have liked as most people seem to be decent folk, even if they are quite unpleasant in front of a screen and keyboard. You mentioned a place near Verdun that is struggling and a few people from here staying there might just be enough to tip them over into remaining solvent. That area is tough. A couple of places I have used in the Argonne area west of Verdun are closed now. Owners retired and they could not sell them as viable businesses. Even Verdun itself has few hotels for the size of town as the vast majority of people are blatting past on the A4 to points further south or east.
Yep, well that's what I meant when I said that you cannot control your audience on SM.
Sadly businesses live and die, sometimes quickly, and especially in the hospitality business.
rustycloe
Registered user
I agree with this. Sharing places and experiences is part of what makes travel forums valuable. A place might become busier after being recommended, but that doesn't mean people should stop sharing their discoveries. Not everyone knows where to go, and a little advice can help someone find a wonderful experience they might otherwise have missed. At the end of the day, discovering and sharing new places is part of the fun of travelling.This was a question asked by Simon_100 in the Oilheads subsection, in a thread about a bod’s (excellent) extended jaunt in Spain. It came about, in part at least, talking about the marmite town of Potes.
They more or less are! Many roads are being resurfaced with 'eco' stuff that's the doggies doodah's here, including mine - see below ...
Potes, is perhaps an example of somewhere that became popular - at least for motorcyclists - simply because it started appearing in every ‘Biker friendly, must do’ article and route suggestion. That the town also gets listed in umpteen ‘Nice places to visit’ travel guides, means that it’s on just about every local itinerary….. a bit like Burton-on-the-Water.
I wonder how many of us keep our very favourite places to ourselves in...
From my point of view, nothing exists in a vacuum for long. Well before the internet, people of all sorts were recommending places across the globe to go to. That these recommendations were usually in a book (travel guides have been around for many, many years) and / or in travel programmes on the television, maybe restricted the audience and / or many people had less disposable income - or the transport means - to go to see the places. That has changed, arguably for the better and certainly for the easier.
That aside, people like to be told of places. This forum and travel section has many examples each month. Anything from requests for an entire holiday, through to specific gorges or a plea for a road of perhaps 30 miles of ‘twisties’ from A to B. Similarly, people like to plug hotel XYZ, which they have discovered. And really, why keep quiet about it? For every, “This is my secret place”, that there will often be 10 or more within a few miles is almost certain, whilst 10 to 1 says, you’ll not be the only person on the globe to know about it anyway. It’s easy to moan, “The place was full of other people….” but then all but ignore that the moaner themselves also formed a part of the ‘other people’, too. Yes, magazines will publish “This is a cracking road”, because, put simply, there is a demand for it *. Yes, people will ask for “Tell me a quiet hotel, close to where I want to go”. Sometimes it’s out of laziness or a lack of imagination (this forum is often overly quick to criticise ‘youth’ for being spoon fed) but quite often simply because people just don’t know. Even something like finding Instagram customer service contacts trips people up, since the official ones are buried in the Help Center. In a way, it is nice to help them discover “This is my secret” and hopefully help them to have a good time.
You can see the responses on the forum: “But that misses out the road from X to Y, it’s sublime”. So, people do like sharing things or, at its most base, just enjoy criticising for the sake of it.
Well hello, hello hello! I've only just seen this and seem to have started a rumble ... 
Just for the record maybe I ought to have highlighted the key to my point, thus,
"I wonder how many of us keep our very favourite places to ourselves in these days of social media?"
I've always been happy to recommend places, roads in particular as well as areas in general that are' off the map' - see below - and I suppose might recommend hotels if only I could afford to use them these days in my gloriously gilded 'boomer' retirement - see below! But lately I've been a bit stung by folks' comment that almost suggest I'd led them astray on purpose - that's the social media thing, too many trolls who's only claim to fame is some bitchy comment - they know who they are.
I also wouldn't inflict many of my favourite places as many are totally off the wall, monstrous derelict Franco era architecture, railway curiosities and, talking of hotels, one in which we had one of the bests shags of our lives only to realise the next morning that we must have been visible to hundreds of people walking along the promenade right outside the balcony window of the ground floor suite - the reception was accessed from the corniche above the beach and in our rush to get our clothes off and get stuck in we didn't suss that the lift went down to our floor rather than up ...
Onwards:
Boomer hatred alert! Since when have offspring have a right to their antecedence - hard earned! - fortunes???
Hmm, yes Molina de Aragón, definitely a favourite place - and the site of another night of passion now that I come to think about it I was able to create my own luck and stayed in the Teruel area for six of seven weeks each year about a decade ago - couldn't get enough of the roads and trains around there - I recorded more than 1,500 kms of excellent trails for off road events but even with backing from a massively well known adventure bike site only a few dozen loyal customers bit the bullet, leaving the thousands of 'intrepid' adventure bikers to go Picos-Pyrenees-Picos-Pyrenees-Picos-Pyrenees ...
Just for the record maybe I ought to have highlighted the key to my point, thus,
"I wonder how many of us keep our very favourite places to ourselves in these days of social media?"
I've always been happy to recommend places, roads in particular as well as areas in general that are' off the map' - see below - and I suppose might recommend hotels if only I could afford to use them these days in my gloriously gilded 'boomer' retirement - see below! But lately I've been a bit stung by folks' comment that almost suggest I'd led them astray on purpose - that's the social media thing, too many trolls who's only claim to fame is some bitchy comment - they know who they are.
I also wouldn't inflict many of my favourite places as many are totally off the wall, monstrous derelict Franco era architecture, railway curiosities and, talking of hotels, one in which we had one of the bests shags of our lives only to realise the next morning that we must have been visible to hundreds of people walking along the promenade right outside the balcony window of the ground floor suite - the reception was accessed from the corniche above the beach and in our rush to get our clothes off and get stuck in we didn't suss that the lift went down to our floor rather than up ...
Onwards:
there have been a few articles in the papers about boomers being more willing to spaff their offspring's inheritance on trips
Pensioners ‘spending their children’s inheritance to go on more holidays’
The trend, known as ski-ing – meaning ‘spending the kids’ inheritance’ – could be down to older people being fitter and wealthier than younger generationswww.independent.co.uk
it has a name SKIing (spending kids inheritance) according to a Times articel
Boomer hatred alert! Since when have offspring have a right to their antecedence - hard earned! - fortunes???
Hmm, yes Molina de Aragón, definitely a favourite place - and the site of another night of passion now that I come to think about it
I was able to create my own luck and stayed in the Teruel area for six of seven weeks each year about a decade ago - couldn't get enough of the roads and trains around there - I recorded more than 1,500 kms of excellent trails for off road events but even with backing from a massively well known adventure bike site only a few dozen loyal customers bit the bullet, leaving the thousands of 'intrepid' adventure bikers to go Picos-Pyrenees-Picos-Pyrenees-Picos-Pyrenees ...
Ah, a man after my own heart! I too like stopping off at train "stuff" when I can. If I see rails I invariably stop for a respite, or I choose my respites around the sites. I think it was my grandfather who first got me into them. He wasn't into them himself, but he saw the look on my face one day when I was 2 and thereafter he used to take me to see it in Asturias until I was about 7. It was our daily walk together.
I hasten to add that I do not collect numbers or anything of the sort, but I do like seeing them, watching them go by. Trains in Spain are sooooo much more interesting than in the UK. I must confess to being a frustrated train driver. I did something else instead. If I'd driven trains, though, I probably would have yearned for that something else. .
I hasten to add that I do not collect numbers or anything of the sort, but I do like seeing them, watching them go by. Trains in Spain are sooooo much more interesting than in the UK. I must confess to being a frustrated train driver. I did something else instead. If I'd driven trains, though, I probably would have yearned for that something else. .
Very much the same here, never was a 'gricer' but just love all aspects of the railways, especially old derelict sites - plenty of them in Spain's 'rust belt' in the Basque Counrty, León and of course in your patria, Asturias! Shame there's so few old steamers in action here tho' ...
Shame there's so few old steamers in action here tho' ...