Motorrad Garage - Africa Twin

Motorrad Garage has opened a new store in Sydney with a speccy-looking Africa Twin on the showroom floor. With a nudge, a wink, and the promise of a Portuguese tart at Laguna, the bike was sniggled out the front door and taken for a magical mystery tour.

 

Technically, this wasn’t supposed to be a magical mystery tour at all, but the editor assured everyone he’d plotted a 200km track on his GPS, and everyone should follow him.

There were some blank looks when he admitted he didn’t know how to get from the store on Parramatta Road in Lidcombe, just to Sydney’s west, 65km out to Wiseman’s Ferry to start the ride, but Motorrad Garage’s Howard and Petra are trusting people, and Howard had that bit covered, so things were off to a good start.

Unfortunately, when TF and Howard met ad man Mitch at Wisemans Ferry, there was no red line on the ed’s GPS.

There were no lines of any colour, really. He put forward the view that it was an adventure after all, and what could be more adventurous than not having the vaguest idea where you were going for two days, but it wasn’t a concept that gained a lot of support.

On the job

The aim of the weekend was to put the Motorrad Garage gear on the Africa Twin through its paces and see how it stood up to some real-world use, so while Mitch and Howard put their heads together to see what kind of routes their combined knowledge could produce, the editor skulked off somewhere muttering something about ‘photos’.

The bike was a 2017 ABS model Africa Twin, mechanically a bog-stocker, but loaded with some very tasty SW Motech gear. The idea was to flog the bejesus out of it – in a measured and responsible way – through some back country loops to arrive at Cessnock, about 90km to the north, for the overnighter. Petra was to drive to Cessnock in the Motorrad Garage van and swap the soft luggage for hard luggage for the return trip.

Of course, Petra left from the new Lidcombe store, so didn’t know the boys had very little idea on where they were going, let alone how to find their way Cessnock before nightfall.