Morning all, my name's Dennis, I'm in Leicestershire and yesterday I got my first Triumph, a Tiger 800 XRT, 19 plate. I've not been biking long - I started in 2003 to commute into Leicester on a Honda CB500, got made redundant but kept riding for a bit, then came off. Long story short, I didn't go back to biking until last summer, when I bought a BMW F800GT. Since then, I've been going round and round locally, and I'm doing an IAMs course with the local group, LADAM (Hi, Bill or Zoe, if you're on here ) I'm off to Spain at the end of the month. My niece is getting married in Albufeira, right at the bottom of Portugal, so I'm using that as the excuse for 10 days of riding south from Santander then back up to Bilbao. Looking forward to it with a mix of excitement and blank terror!! Anyway, hello there.
Great intro and fab picture. Welcome to the family. You will be fine mate it all comes back in an instance. And big and the Tiger is a confidence building bike and sounds just right. Good luck with your trip. Do let us al know how you get on. Joe
That sounds like quite an adventure! I hope that you can fit a suit and tie into your luggage for the wedding! I love the bike! I was thinking about one of those, but opted for a Trophy SE in addition to the Sprint GT pictured because of the wind protection and riding position. Besides, it was rather cheap because it had 25k miles (about 40k kms) on the clock. It is a heavy one, though. Will you route include many motorways or will you chart a route on smaller roads? I hope that you also invested in great rain gear. A long day in wet clothes will be miserable. As you can see from the photo, I carry the bike to a destination and pick the nice days to ride! Post photos along the way!
I'll only be using motorways if I'm behind schedule on each day, but I shouldn't need to - I've planned routes that give me lots of resting time. And yes, I'll be using rainproof clothes - I'm Scottish, and even though I live in England now, I never go anywhere without them!
Thanks @joe mc donald - I've finally got around to putting up some pics of my trip in the touring thread, if you're interested.
Thanks, @joe mc donald - I've finally got around to putting some photos in the touring forum, if you're interested.
I thought it was a decent bike, but I had two problems with it - I kept stalling the bugger, especially on hill starts, and so I kept dropping it. Because it had whopping plastic panniers, I never did any damage, to either the bike or me, but it was very embarrassing to keep doing it. And the second one was that the guys at IAMs reckoned I need a tall roader, so I could get a better seating position. Once I got on the Tiger, I completely understood - I'm more comfortable, I don't get as tired as I used to on the Beemer so I can ride for longer, and I don't get pins and needles in my left hand the way I used to. So the Tiger is more my kind of bike, really. Nowt wrong with the F800GT in principle, just that it didn't really suit me as well as the Tiger does.