The Roads We Choose
I have ridden motorcycles for most of my adult life. People occasionally ask what I enjoy about them, usually people who have never ridden one themselves, and I have never found a particularly good answer.
The Triumph in the garage is getting on a bit now. I have owned newer motorcycles and they are undoubtedly easier to live with. They start when asked, need less attention and seldom leave anything unexpected on the garage floor. The Triumph can be less accommodating, although I have owned it long enough to know most of its habits.
Yesterday I went out on it after lunch. I had no particular destination in mind and expected to be back within an hour or two, which turned out to be optimistic.
I followed the road towards Betws-y-Coed at first, then changed my mind and took one of the smaller roads instead. I had used it before, although not recently. Ten or fifteen miles later I reached another junction and turned there as well. There was no particular reason for choosing it. I had enough petrol and the road went somewhere, which seemed sufficient.
After a while I realised I was travelling in roughly the opposite direction from home. There was a gateway a little further on where I could easily have turned around, but the road was dry and I was enjoying myself, so I carried on.
Riding does that to me in a way driving never has. If I get into the car, it is generally because I need to be somewhere, and I usually know where I am going before I turn the key. On the Triumph, I am much less bothered by taking twenty miles to cover a distance that could have been ten.
Some of the roads around here demand concentration anyway. There are bends where you cannot see more than a few yards ahead, patches that remain damp long after the rest of the road has dried and enough loose gravel to discourage unnecessary enthusiasm. Sheep provide their own difficulties.
One stood in the road yesterday and watched me approach with complete confidence that dealing with the situation was my responsibility. It turned out to be right. A tractor appeared a few miles later on a section barely wide enough for the tractor, never mind a motorcycle coming the other way. I pulled into what remained of a gateway and waited while it passed. The driver lifted two fingers from the steering wheel. I did the same and carried on.
By then I had stopped thinking about when I would get home. I was watching the road and enjoying being out on the bike, which was probably all the explanation I needed.
I stopped for coffee at a place I have used before. There were four motorcycles outside and enough empty tables for me to sit where I could see the Triumph. From there I noticed how badly it needed cleaning, although I had noticed much the same thing before leaving home. An hour or so on damp roads had done nothing to improve it.
One of the other motorcycles was considerably newer than mine. Its owner came outside with his coffee, looked at the Triumph and asked how long I had owned it. We talked for a few minutes. The weather came first, followed by the roads, then motorcycles we had owned and motorcycles we wished we had kept.
Conversations like that happen quite easily between motorcyclists. Two people can arrive knowing nothing about one another beyond what they have parked outside and still have enough in common to talk for half an hour. We never exchanged names. There was no particular reason why we should.
He left before I did. I finished my coffee, put my gloves back on and started towards home. At the next junction I changed my mind again and took another road that I had not used for some time.
I thought I remembered it reasonably well. The first few miles suggested that I did. There was a stone bridge, two farms and a long bend beside a wall that I remembered mostly because I had once met a delivery van halfway around it. Beyond there, much less of the road came back to me.
A few miles further on I passed a narrow turning on the left that I could not remember at all. I carried on for perhaps fifty yards before curiosity got the better of me. There was enough room to turn safely, so I went back to see where it led.
There was nothing particularly inviting about it. The lane disappeared between two hedges and the road surface suggested that nobody responsible for maintaining it had visited recently. I took it anyway.
It eventually brought me onto a road I knew, although not where I expected. I had probably ridden the lane before at some point. If I had, I remembered none of it.
There are plenty of roads like that in North Wales. I can ride through places I have known for years and still find roads I have forgotten, or discover that two familiar places are connected by a lane I have never thought to use. I rather like being reminded that knowing an area well is not the same as knowing every part of it.
I was beginning to feel the cold by the time I reached Tal-y-Cafn. It was nothing serious, but I noticed it when I stopped outside the house and pulled my gloves off.
The Triumph was considerably dirtier than it had been when I left. I put it in the garage and decided I would clean it today. It is still sitting there in much the same condition, so that can wait.
I had gone out for an hour or two and returned considerably later by a route I could probably reproduce if I needed to. I had not discovered anywhere remarkable and nothing happened that would make much of a story.
I enjoyed the ride, and that was enough.