Taking a little trip to the Green Hut cafe and Willingham woods tomorrow. We’re starting from Tankersley (just north of Sheffield) at 10am. If anyone wants to come or meet somewhere along the way let me know.
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Bit too short notice as we’ve got grandkids now for an egg hunt.
Yeah, it was a fairly last minute plan, unfortunately.
Bacon sandwiches. Difficult to resist. Sunny Easter holidays. Also hard to resist. It’s been a long winter of cold days, incessant rain and salty roads. To be given a genuine sunny day with temperatures, if not Mediterranean, at least acceptable with an additional layer underneath the leather jacket was too good to miss. Jobs at home could wait. Motorcycles could not.
Walking out to the garage the air felt a bit too fresh, even though it was just after ten of the clock by then. As the dash lit up it kindly informed me that it was all of 8C in the shade. Not what I’d call summer but ok. It’s always a couple of degrees cooler where we live so I was expecting double figures as we dropped down from the hills.
Between family committments, Covid, and whatever else people had to do that was better than riding a bike in the sunshine, we were just three at the meet point to start our lttile jaunt. One Ducati Streetfighter, one Tiger 900 and a MV Superveloce hit the road south towards Rotherham, where we would not be stopping. Our destination was the Green Hut Cafe on the A616 in New Ollerton, about 45 miles away.
The roads are pretty good once you’re off the M1 with some nice sweeping bends to get in the groove. There were plenty of bikes parked up outside.
As we turned the keys, pushed out the sidestands and removed helmets, a familiar voice said ‘hello’ and there was or very own @ducatitotriumph, who’d ridden up country on a whim to catch us on our way towards a fried breakfast! It’s been a while and reminded me that words and pictures are good but there’s noithing like catching up in person. Sadly, Simon couldn’t stay for long but at least we’d managed to cross paths for ten minutes…With three members of the forum present (including @Motopulcino) I declared it a TMF meet-up!
In all the excitement I forgot to take a pic of Simon’s bike so I’'ll leave him to provide pictures of all the work he’s done to his Street Triple. Someone has definitely been spending too much time with the parts catalogue and eBay. Over to you, Simon…
One hearty breakfast later we took off from the Green Hut and headed further south in to the wilds of Lincolnshire. I’ve never been to Willingham Woods. One of my biking objectives this year is to visit a number of places on our map. So that’s one ticked off.
For some reason I was expecting Willingham to be bigger, more like a car park leading in to some common woodland paths. Actually it’s just a glorified lay-by with a brick hut service tea and coffee.
Unsurprisingly on a sunny day, there were a lot of bikes lined up along the length of the stop-pff. Mostly just regular stuff but there were a couple of interesting ones.
I wasn’t leading the way on this occasion, and I’m not familiar with the routes we took, so I can’t say much about the journey other than we enjoyed a good mix of twisties and fast A roads. I tracked the route on the TomTom but didn’t manage to save it so you’ll have to take my word for it.
The temperature hit a high of 16C on our return stint. Summer gloves had turned out to be the right choice. Here’s hoping for some more sunny bank holidays.
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Cheers for the inspirational write up… makes me want to get out from all the decorating crap I’ve been buried under and burn off the last remaining rubber from the canvas… The weather is a little dubious though, lots of wind blown debris.
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If I’ve inspired at all then it’s merely returning the favour. It was a bit stormy last night but the sun is fighting the clouds for space in the sky again today. Weekend temperatures are looking promising though I don’t think we’ll need to pack the sun lotion.
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No pics of the speed but if you think of a tarts white handbag, covered in glitter, a small dollop of gearbox oil in the bottom and bought on ebay, you’ll be close!!
