Dark Days of Winter

After one of the hottest/longest summers on record, Autumn (Fall) has come in with a bang over the last few days and with the clocks now having gone back one hour, that winter feeling starts to take over. What better time then, to do a little bit of blogging about the Wild Hogs summer tour.

To be fair, there is little to talk about. I've been keeping my eye open for some of the first choice hotels I couldn't book, to see if any have begun to publish dates/prices for 2019 and a couple have. I have, therefore, booked them up and have cancelled the backup options I'd already booked. One, despite now having dates published, claims to be sold out for the one night we want to stay, though every day around it is available. Not a problem, I've booked another hotel in the same town. That wasn't an option previously. I'm still waiting on a couple and hopefully as we progress towards the end of the year, they too will become available for me to book.

For those interested in where we are staying, I've created a list, Homes from Home, which you'll find on the right hand side of the blog, if you page down a bit. I'm really looking forward to staying in some, as the locations are just fantastic, looking at the photos.

Grizzly, a.k.a. Sanch O'Panza, is scheduled for a hip replacement in December. Hopefully everything will go OK and he'll be like a new man by the time we depart for Iberia in June. Riding and getting on/off the bike can be quite painful for him at the moment and sometimes, amusing for me. I'll gladly give up the odd chuckle to see the wee fella fit again though.

Besides the hotel booking, I'm looking at the route again and breaking it down in to more manageable Tomtom sized chunks. Given the way Tomtom identifies stops and way-marks or more accurately, the way it doesn't, it is easier to break each day up into tiny routes to each of the stops during the day. I'm hitting the usual problem though, as we head into winter, that being that some of the mountain roads are already closed, so the route displayed, is not the actual roue we'll be taking. Still, there's plenty of time to get them sorted, once the thaw comes next spring.

If you haven't already signed up for email updates, then get that done. That way you won't miss any updates. I know there aren't many at the moment but that's the point, you don't want to miss one when there is one.

When a plan starts coming together

With the ferries to Spain booked and most of my first choice hotels already bagged, Grizzly and I discussed the first day, i.e. the day he arrives in England and I ride to Portsmouth. I'd imagined that he'd ride the whole way from Pembroke to Portsmouth but Sanch O'Panza ain't as young as he used to be or he's just a wuss, one of the two, so he's decided to split the journey when he arrives in Blighty and has thus booked a hotel on the M4 at Magor, just passed Newport, for the Monday night.

To be fair to the old fella, he will have been up since about 5am in order to get his ferry at Rosslare, so a 250 mile ride this side, having done a hundred or so back in Ireland, might be a bit tiring. In any case, there's no rush. We'll still meet up in Portsmouth on Tuesday 11th July, for an overnighter before the ferry to Bilbao.

I've booked us in the Keppel's Head Hotel, less than 3 miles from the ferry terminal. It's an historic hotel, built in 1779 and sits right by all the dockyard attractions, HMS Victory, HMS Warrior and the Mary Rose. If you look on Booking.com, some of the photos are so grainy, they may well have been taken on a 1779 camera! (yes, I know they didn't exist then). It has free on-site parking, which is always something I look out for on our tours and includes both a full English and Irish breakfast. That's us both sorted then. 😉  It also has a bar!

That's all for now.

Our overnight in Pompey