Originally Posted by sockpuppet

Hi guys, the usual question being asked here.

I'm currently looking at my bike options for a rtw trip that I plan to start early 2010. Rough plan is to do a shakedown trip round the scandanavia half way through this year and leave 6 months later (give or take).

The one problem I am struggling with is that I also want to use the bike to commute for the year preceding the trip. I don't have room for 2 bikes (one parking space & a car to find a home for in inner city).

As I'm self employed I have to commute to differnt work places and for the past 3 years I've commuted an average of 180-200 miles a day (by car) - I work all over so moving closer isn't an option but I reckon a bike would save 1 hour a day just in filtering (this is not town driving either - slow moving motorway)

So I've narrowed my options.

1200GSA - Yes its big, heavy, expensive. But as a ride it was excellent. Ok there are questions over the reliability but from what I've read these are mostly easy fixes (FPC - similar to carrying a spare pump for the AT or flat battery) or faults that develop over time (final drive) with the being fairly easy to replace.

F650 GS Dakar - Nice, but not sure I could do 200 miles on it every day. Fuel range of 220 miles means a trip to the petrol station every day which could become a pain and mean I had to dip into the reserve everyday. Tourtech fuel tank is expensive and with a devent low mileage model of £4k so £1.5k for the tank the bike is not that cheap.

AT (750) or TransAlp - Almost as heavy as the R1200GSA. Seems to be more reliable but smaller tank.


So does anyone have any experiance of the bikes above. I've had lots of people tell me the GS bikes are awful and that I'd be a nutter to attempt it becuase they're far too electronic. But similarly I've heard lots of people say they've done a rtw on a 1150/1200gsa but no-one has yet said they tried one on it and the electornics tried to kill them in thier sleep.

But am I missing any other solid options - that can commute (uk weather) and be a viable option for overland travel. I don't have space for two bikes and would like to bond with it before I go so a bike that can commute and perform rtw both would be nice. I know that's a big ask and if too much I'll have to reconsider - but its worth asking. Now I know I'm asking for a compromise. A DR650 style carb thumper would probably be the best bet when doing an rtw tour (particularly for Africa) - but I'd suffer on the sections where the complex bikes aren't disadvanteaged (eg. Europe, N. America, (S. America to an extent?), Australia etc).

As for me: I'll be travelling one up solo most of the time - so probably won't go too far "off piste" even if I had a bike that I could do that mainly becuase even bikes which never break and can be mended by a twig and a stone by a caveman could break and be US. I'm also 6'4", 19 stone lump so weight of a bike is important but I'm not a 5'3" twig.
I suppose its down to what I want to spend/I'm happy with having seen the videos about R1 Enduro I'm convinced anything can do it.