RideTurkey Challenge-2

[the venturer]

Hi you all! Been away from this part of the forum. Haven't sold my bike , still alive and riding. Back with a fascinating ride report.

Last weekend, I and five more guys from İstanbul were outta. We were divided up into two teams: KTM vs BMW. We are riders hanging around at http://www.rideturkey.com and I quite like it there and would strongly recommend you to visit it.

Enough of intro.

Simply as follows: it takes part on a 35 km straight line in Thrace.

The aim is to get to these blue circles, there are around 81 as far as I can recall.

Practising on Google Earth

 

[the venturer]

I arrived at the first night's camping spot in advance as I live close to there. It was afternoon. Tonguç, a guy from our team, had a flat on the way up to here and they were late by 5 hrs, add İstanbul traffic, too.
Meanwhile, I had a long chat with locals and busy with one eye on TV, soccer between England and Algeria.

Camping spot

Testing very new TKCs on.

 

[the venturer]

Finally, we are together. Nice looking chaps though we are enemies
Guess, which one is me?

At the camping spot, late at night.

 

[the venturer]

Just another shot

 

[the venturer]

Having erected the tents, we needed some fill-up. Cheeries and apricots are all from my garden. Believe me, no pesticides on them. Never.
Ali, from KTM team, seems to have not liked it.


But me and Halit liked them.Mmmm,yummy!


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

 

[the venturer]

The air was soft, the stars were so fine, I thought I was in a dream and fell asleep suddenly.

Next day...
We woke up very early, bread and juice in my mouth, I was trying to pack up everything.
In an hour, we were ready to set off. It was us who started riding first.
''The end has a start'' and we need to find that point first.
The moment we turned left from the road to the hill, we were off the road.

It was a hot day. And we were demoralized by this path.

 

[the venturer]

We weren't fast but very careful. We knew the route would show us more.
I have missed all that.

Never ending

 

[the venturer]

Topo showed a shortcut which we would never reject.
We were riding down into the woods. Damn it. I will never forget that part. It was so hard to ride, say climb, up.

 

[the venturer]

On Sunday morning, I woke up first. It was around 7 a.m. and went for a walk with a sandwich in hand took some pics. Having returned to the campsite, I found some of the gang still sleeping peacefully and some up.

 

[the venturer]

Here we go again. Two KTM racers joined us,too.

And we are looking for more of those checkpoints.

 

[the venturer]

A member of the team advised us to turn back to the part we were unable to complete yesterday, saying there were more of those checkpoints left from yesterday's ride.

And so we did. But we found the route far difficult to take.

Water all around.

Back to the finishline! Our last decision!

Our cheerleaders

It's all untouched here. No one around and lovely nature.

 

[the venturer]

Seems like a jungle and the closer the finishline is, the greener the terrain is.

They all look like each other and it's difficult to distinguish the paths from each other.

Navigation-Calculation. We don't have much time to get to the point.

We are finding them one by one

It's just so green and peaceful everywhere!

 

[the venturer]

Nothing much left and we are happier every minute. We need to finish as soon as possible because we are dead tired.

 

[the venturer]

Happy ending. At the finishline.

We are all glad to have completed it without a failure or worse; an accident.

BMW TEAM

That's all. Thanks for giving your time here.

Safe Rides.