See Naples and die

This is shaping up to be an epic journey. Good for many hours of entertainment in the local bar, with pictures!

Sounds fun, wishing I was there!

Its difficult to post pictures as I have very poor internet here. Managed to upload 2 images but it took like 30 minutes!

Been riding all over the Cévennes National Park today to visit a cave, I have to say these mountain paths are a real event especially since I live in a country without hills let alone mountains, so lack experience with them. The roads here are riddled with hairpins, they do not announce them with a sign, the road on most places is about 1.25x the width of a car, and there are many spots with holes, gravel and fallen rocks. I ran into one section of the road of about 500 meters that they were ‘renovating’ which meant it was covered by 10cm of gravel, real fun when going down a steep slope!

Bonjour de Cévennes!
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motor-timothy wrote:

Its difficult to post pictures as I have very poor internet here. Managed to upload 2 images but it took like 30 minutes!

Been riding all over the Cévennes National Park today to visit a cave, I have to say these mountain paths are a real event especially since I live in a country without hills let alone mountains, so lack experience with them. The roads here are riddled with hairpins, they do not announce them with a sign, the road on most places is about 1.25x the width of a car, and there are many spots with holes, gravel and fallen rocks.

 When my father who lives in the flatlands of Canada first came to visit me in Santa Cruz, he was appalled by the twisty roads through the forested mountains - "How do you drive these damn roads - you can't see around the corners!"

barry

Silly old man, that's what we live for!

Epic adventure! I'm jealous. Very glad to hear there were no disasters - only learning.
Thank you so much for sharing.

Cheers,
Stefan

Back home

So everything mostly went well. I arrived at our paleolithic site in France in good order. Spend 3 weeks there excavating which was a very different experience than Mediterranean archaeology.

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I left for home last weekend, the plan was to ride to Étretat in Normandy to stay there for 2 days while enjoying the beach. Unfortunately it was the black saterday weekend, so all hotels and campsites there were completely full or super expensive. There was also a cellular network disruption so I couldn’t search for other campsites in the region. It was 38 degrees and I was completely cooked. Rode as close to the beach as I could, ran up the beach in my gear, stripped to my underwear and dived into the water.

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Afterwards had a nice meal, and at 22:00 I continued riding in the hope of finding something to sleep. At 2am I camped next to an autogrill/fuel station alongside the highway. Oh well.

All in all nothing majorly bad happened. Almost hit a crossing hare in France, thats pretty much it.
The GRiSO held up fine, though the clutch cyclic rattle in neutral has become much louder than before my journey, its a pretty loud rattle now that reduces in volume if I press the clutch lever a second time for some reason.... Also, while under load around 3000-3500rpm there is a fairly loud rattle coming from somewhere, which goes away when the RPM rises above 3500 or I’m no longer accelerating.

Cracked or loose exhaust bracket maybe?
Check your pretzel.

Nah I checked all the obvious places. Maybe its the topbox vibrating, though while riding it seems to come from the front top of the engine. Are there any obvious reasons why the engine itself could rattle only at a certain RPM while under load? Or is it pretty much guaranteed to be something outside of the engine vibrating?

Oops, sorry.  Did I misread the thread title?

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I didn't know her name was Naples.