Quote:
Originally Posted by BlackDogZulu
My 500th post! Go me.
My daughter and I will be taking a short road trip to France and Germany soon. It won't be an 'adventure' in the off-road sense, but it might be in several other ways (her first bike trip).
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Two key words here - 'daughter' and 'first'.
One thing missing - how old she is.
I've done a lot of trips with my daughter as pillion, the first when she was about 15. (Although she'd been on the back for local dad's-taxi-trips for years).
To S of France and Spain. Then Portugal on another trip and then getting really out of hand with Moscow, Istanbul and beyond.
On a Ducati and Aprilia.
I'm sure you'll get all the up-to-date road-legal stuff, but there's an aspect that needs close planning if you've not aready got it 110% under control.....
Luggage.
My daughter's a walking clothes-horse/mannequin. Always has been always will.
And I took no account of this on trip No.1. To find she'd packed clothes for everything from daytime to glittering evening balls.
And hair-dryers and heaven knows what else are heavy.....
It was a lot of stress. I couldn't figure out why the bike felt so heavy until I saw, on day 2 or so, what she'd crammed and levered into her share of the panniers. Too late by then, but looking back maybe I should have forced her to jettison a load of it.
Trip No. 2 (hilly parts of Portugal) - she'd found a way of squeezing even more stuff in, ignoring the problems we had on trip No.1
Make sure you've got good control of what gets loaded.
My only consolation - I'm pretty sure I learned a lot about handling an overloaded bike on tricky mountain roads on those trips.
Every cloud and all that......
And travelling with your daughter is g-r-e-a-t.
(Especially when you book into a youth hostel, my daughter doing the talking, and the guy behind the counter says "and this is your boyfriend..."
Never saw her get so angry so quickly!)
Have a good trip.