Fri, 9 Oct 1998 21:24:40 +0200 - Message No. 4222
From: "Martin Franz"

Subject: Autumn Offroad Report


Hi ATIC's !
We are back from the Autumn Offroad meeting, which is now renamed to "malaka
rain" meeting. Yeah, "meeting" is somewhat a too huge word:  when one guy
was on the toilet, 33% of the participants where missing...

Day one:
we decided to meet in Gemona as Tolmezzo has no camping. Martin came over
Slowenia (Wurzenpass, Vrsic, Predil) a very nice route. Ingo already made
some "gravel" on Ploeckenpass. Rain was not very strong, just simple rain.

Day two: the "Tourenfahrer" day
made the roads described in the "tourenfahrer", a german touring magazine.
Having heavy fog, we could see no panorama :-((  But we had some "easy
offroad" on monte paularo, which made worth the trip !

Day Three: the "river" day, WAUW !!!
Speaking to some hard core crosser, we drove to Pinzano and entered the
Tagliamento river. Boy, THIS was offroad, meaning NO road at all !!!
Martin was using the "first drive, then think" method for crossing the river
and learned something new: "never cross the river at the DEEPEST point". The
only thing, which you could see from his bike was the windscreen and the
Givi Top case looking out of the water :-))))

Ingo used a quite similar method: "full throttle at every occasion". Trying
to get out of the river, he used FULL throttle. Suddenly the rear tire
hardly digged in. Yeahh MORE throttle helps ?!?  Yup, number plate
disapeared. More throttle !!??!!  Yup !!!!  Front wheel came free !  At the
end, the rear side of the Africa was complety digged in, and the front was
pointing towards the stars. Ingo: "Easy to check stearing head bearing now"
:-)))

Unfortunatly, Martin's bike digged in at a "deep mud place". It took half an
hour and all our power to get the damn bike out again, uhhhh....afterwards,
we had to take a bath in the river cause we looked like some weird mud
monsters.

At the evening Stephan arrived. Had a nice 750km trip in constant rain.

Day four: malaka rain day
Sitting till four o'clock watching the rain. We where wet like a fish. When
the rain stopped for 5 minutes, we jumped onto the bikes and went for some
offroad. Some greek "easy" offroad in the rain :-))  The owner of the
camping place felt so sorry for us "fish guys", that he offered us an old
camping trailer for the night. There we spend the night drinking beer and
greek fanta.

Day five: no more dry cloths
everything wet, driving home...

See you at the next inofficial offroad meeting !




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