CORONA TOURING
“SO WE ABANDONED COL AND HIS STUFFED TYRE, BECAUSE WE COULD…”
The tyre was cactus. OK, it was still round and black, but it had gone from borderline to “stuffed” inside 150km, and we were less than one-third of the distance into a multi-day ride from our base in the Hunter Valley through the Blue Mountains and on to NSW’s spectacular south. So we abandoned Col and his stuffed tyre because we could, Col accepting his sin bin time for the “unprepared” with grace.
It’s October 2020 and Coronavirus has closed state borders. The weather has been all over the place and I have a seven-day window to test Ducati’s Multistrada S GT, so I’m taking this long-distance machine on a long-distance ride…
Motorcycle touring is an exclusive club that 98 per cent of the population can’t join. Fortunately, a bulging wallet isn’t an admission requirement. To quote the disgraced Lance Armstrong, “It’s not about the bike.”
Our small team consisted of a dinosaur bike – a good, but not the latest thing machine – and the “all singing, all dancing” Ducati GT. It would be interesting to see what difference, if any, this would make to the journey.
The BOM suggested a four-day weather window for southern NSW, neither dry nor heavy rain forecast, ideal for testing. (The BOM isn’t entirely trustworthy
