Bike show is over, now it's time to explore England!

Wasting time in the English countryside!

After we packed up the displays from the show it was time to say goodbye to Birmingham for a bit. David and Gary got everything loaded into the car and we headed down the motorway (on the wrong side of the road) to David's in Overton. It only took us less than two hours to get a quarter of the way across the country! In the USA this would take a couple of days, not hours! After a good night's rest we had a bit of breakfast and went to go see H-C Travel and the rest of Overton, a nice little town in the English countryside.


Now that we were done working it was time to go for a bit of a walk and see the country. We walked around the little town of Overton, stopping occasionally to see the local shops and the town in general. A very nice little country town, a place even Gary said he would like to live in. Sure there aren't any mountians like we're used to but nice nonetheless.

We stopped off on our walk around town to take a look at the local church, older than almost all of the places back home in Colorado.

Gary wasn't used to the narrow, small little roads we saw all over England, good thing he wasn't driving anywhere, plus the big dummy would probably end up on the wrong side of the road anyway. After the first day of wandering around Overton we went back for a wonderful dinner with David and Penny, a bit of conversation and then off to bed for a nice night's rest.

The next day we got up, had a nice cup of tea and walked up to the train station to take a day trip down to Salisbury to see some friends and the local attractions. It was about a mile to the train station, but a very nice walk. We got on the train and were very impressed at how nice they were and how easy it was to get around the local area this way. A quick 30 minutes later we were in Salisbury and got a ride from one of our friends from a previous tour. He was nice enough to take us up to go see one of the oldest mysteries in England, Stonehenge! Just a bit out of town it was nice to go see, although a bit expensive and they wouldn't let us get within fifty feet from the actual stones. I asked why and the nice people looking after it said that they had so many people visiting that it might be damaging to them to allow everyone get that close.

But we had a good time looking around and taking some pictures and video. We then met another friend from a previous tour who was nice enough to drive us around the local area to see the rest of the countryside. After Stonehenge we drove down to a small local town to see a little oddity in front of the village church.



Apparently the locals have been keeping track of the price of bread here for over two hundred years, carving the price into a piece of stone and placing it in the wall surrounding the local church. The stones give the year and the price for a Gallon of bread, which gives you some idea of inflation over a very long period of time. We never found out just exactly why this was done, but we guessed that this was so everyone paid the same price. Those silly humans!

After a quick picture, it was time to travel onward to see another local landmark. During the second world war there were a very large amount of both American and British soldiers stationed in the area around the airfields set up in the area to defend the English Isles and bomb Germany.
While they were in the area they discovered that just under a foot or so of earth the ground was comprised of almost pure white chalk. Having discovered this someone came up with the idea to carve away the topsoil in the shape of the regimental symbol, and then all of the units in the area followed suit. It's even visible on Google earth, and is just a little ease-southeast of the little town of Fovant.

Taking a look around at the silly humans carving up the ground again, boy do they do some strange things!

Here they are, a bit hard to see from this angle though!

Looks like someone Dancing doesn't it!

This one is much easier to see, and is much better maintained!

So is this one, but I can't really tell what it looks like, pretty though!

Our friend and tour guide for the day, thank you and hopefully we'll see you again soon!

The final Days at the NEC Motorcycle Show

For the next few days of the show we spent a lot of time meeting really nice from all over the U.K.. We also had some more friends come by and say hello. We also got some time to go wander around the show and get a look at all the new motorcycles coming out for the next year. There were Harleys, Hondas, Kawasaki's, BMW's, Triumph, Royal Enfields, Triumph, and many more.


We walked around for quite a while looking and drooling over all the new bikes. We saw some really nice motorcycles and all the neat stuff that goes with them. I even got the chance to ride the new Honda 80cc. It's a lot of power for yours truly, but a lot of fun.


We also saw several bikes that were just my size! They would be perfect for doing the tours for me, but Gary said that he didn't have enough money to buy a bike just for me, so I guess I'll just have to be happy riding on the back of his bike.


I liked this bike a lot, it was just about my size! But I just didn't like the colors! So we walked around some more looking at all the neat stuff until one bike caught my attention.

This is the one!

Now this is much better, now all I need is for Harley-Davidson to make a bike my size for doing the tours. If you're gonna do "The American road" (Historic Route 66), then I think you need to do it on a classic American motorcycle. But with this bike I could do the whole Route in just a couple of days, not weeks! After the silly human dragged me off this bike kicking and screaming, he saw a bike we had to go see.


This is the bike Gary was obsessed with. This is the new Triumph touring bike, and the silly human kept babbling about it being the perfect bike for Touring around the U.K.. He said something about if he was going to be riding around the U.K. he should do it on a local bike. This one was just perfect…until Gary saw the price tag and then converted it into US Dollars! The poor guy just about passed out, but I calmed him down with a Guinness and we kept looking around. Then as we were going back to look at it again, something else caught Gary's attention (thank goodness too, I hate seeing that guy cry). We were walking back to the Triumph when we heard someone calling out the silly humans' name. We looked all around until I noticed where it was coming from.


It was these beautiful ladies modeling the new Kawasaki bike. Apparently Gary met one of them the night before at the Pub when he and some friends from a previous tour went out for dinner and a few pints (and the B@$*@%d left me behind at the B&B). Then they saw me and forgot all about Gary! They wanted to play with me and Gary said it was okay, and then they wanted a picture of me with them! All of the other human men looking at us, were mumbling something about me being the luckiest bear in the world, or something like that!




It didn't end there either, after we said goodbye and walked around some more a couple of other human Ladies wanted to give me a hug. They were really cute too! I got my hug s and it was time to get back to the H.C. Travel booth and go back to work (the silly human kept whining about staying there with the pretty girls though). So we went back and met some more really nice folks and had a great time at the show. I sure hope we get to come back to the show next year so I can get some more hugs!

That's about all for now, keep checking back as the story continues…