Ballast...

Bet you never realised that Davros had feet...

Under crystal blue Tyrolean skies we set off for Lindau, a place none of us had heard of, including me when I booked it but as it is easier to spell than 'Friedrichshafen' (which incidentally and being close to my heart is the place where Ferdinand von Zeppelin set up his dirigible factory around the turn of the 20th century) we were nailed on to go to the six letter neighbour on Lake Constance. And what a day it was... the scenery changed from the rugged drama of the Austrian Alps to the no less awe inspiring pine forested peaks of the German variety and we were up and down 'em all day.

As seen previously on FB but the respective estates of
Messrs Morcambe and Wise objected to the comparison

Now at this point I should explain that carrying around an extra 100kg of ballast on the back of one's bike is neither necessary (especially when one is carrying enough in one's own right) nor conducive to achieving the extra couple of mph you've spent a month's bar tab on tweaking out of the bike but having Neil as a pillion is fun... as you can see... no false smiles or anything. With little else to do other than enjoy the scenery, oh and hang on for grim life on occasion, Neil managed to spend a whole ten minutes of a six hour ride shooting some video of us winding our way through the hills. What he failed to capture, however, included Digger attempting his own version of the Burt Bacharach classic, 'One wheel on my motorcycle' when at an inopportune moment his back wheel became somewhat looser than it might be at it's most effective. That fixed, Digger then became involved with Tony in the comedy moment of the day when the sat nav finally got it's own back and sent both lemmings into a field. An angry passing German cyclist commented over the sound of his squeaking lycra something to the effect that fields are for cows. Yes, indeed.

Lindau is actually a very pretty island village reached via a road bridge a few hundred metres into the lake. The Hotel Gasthof Stift, the general manager of which is a chap named Kurt von Schweinscheisse and who asked specifically for a mention here, was very pleasant and the cellar bar made the perfect place to make increasingly bigger arses of ourselves until kickout at 2.45am.

Bugger, where's the road gone...?

...it's here you morons :)

No need to describe...

Also needs no explanation...

Incredible machines... a mere 45 million engine
revolutions between them on the trip to date

Lunch... we do eat food too

Siamese triplets see the funnier side of life...