An update from T about our Easter trip.

I pushed past the 600 mile break-in by the end of the Easter weekend ride. This is a sweet bike for dirt and not bad on the pavement either. We ended up leaving on Thursday night and staying a place on the beach. It was just K and I for the first night. She sent me a message at work with grid coordinates and I had to track down clues to figure out what was going on. I found that she has already packed for the weekend and left a note saying to just bring what I needed for riding Thursday and Friday. Friday was our 5th anniversary so she had a friend look after the girls and we spent a night at a nice place n the beach. Of course I had two ships pulling in a the Secretary of the US Navy arriving the next week so I was a little busy and couldn’t actually get away very early to track down my clues. When I did get off, I figured out that she had picked a nice place on the other side of the really congested end of Accra. Traffic was terrible and it was getting dark. The divided highway that they are building is not quite done yet so no one follow any rules. Several times I looked up to find a bus hurling head on towards me – they were going the wrong way down the divided highway without lights! Yikes. I finally turned off, but since I didn’t have a map of the area and was going on GPS and memory I turned off too early. Not to worry – I have this off road mo-to-cicle I can go anywhere. I almost had to as I made it to the beach and was following a sandy path for about five miles till I was on the wrong side of a salt lagoon looking at the lights on the other side 1.1 miles from the waypoint. Found a gate and a way around and made it there slightly after dark and after a lot of backtracking in the village next to the resort – that was interesting as the bike is pretty tall for me and turning it around in crowded streets is not the easiest thing to do even when not challenged by seat height! I got there and had a nice evening with K – the first time that we had been without kids in quite a while. What a great surprise for our anniversary!

The next day J met me out at the beach and we headed off while K headed back to Accra to pick up J, the girls and the dog. Je and I took little paved roads till we got the south side of a crater lake called Bousumtwi. The pavement ran out well before the hills and the path to get to the lake was far from clear. The bikes were great and really came alive on the dirt paths. The rougher the terrain the better the bike seemed to work. I was covering good dirt roads at 90 kph, not so good at 70-80, bad at 60 or less and really nasty at whatever speed I needed, 0 – fast. At several stages we asked directions and were told that there was no way that the bikes could make it – sounds like a Rover trip! In most cases the reports were wrong as they usually are. We only had to walk the bikes over one rickety walking bridge though there was a really-really steep decent that was a semi paved four foot wide path leading down the lake side that was pretty interesting. We made it to the bottom and found that there was a path that went most of the way around the lake and led all the way to the hotel! Unfortunately the girls were not there yet, having decided to take the main road rather than the back roads and running into massive traffic jams due to Easter weekend travelers. Easter is the big go home and, as we found out on Sunday, get drunk weekend. The girls finally got there an hour after dark and ready for a beer. We had already ordered dinner which can take some time in Ghana, so there was food to go along with the beverages. Everyone slept pretty well that night!

We spent the next day off the bikes. K, Ju, the girls and I went by Land Rover to Obuasi a gold mine town to have lunch. It was a nice drive there, but H had a few melt downs on the road home. All in all a good day! Obuasi looked like a place we could go back to some time.

We headed home on Easter Sunday; Je and I on the bikes looking for a little exploration and the girls with the Rover taking the back roads home so that K did not have to see the main road traffic again. Turns out that there was no – zero – traffic on the main road that day, but they had a nice drive through the countryside anyhow. Je and I had one of the best most scenic dual sport rides ever as we searched for the end of one road that leads out into the Afram Plains then came back to find a route over the plateau south of Lake Volta. It was a cool ride and well worth the effort. There was sand, freshly plowed dozer tracks, hard pack with run-off gullies, two track twisting paths, hard pack red laterite with a gravelly ball-bearing like surface and even some well paved twisties at the end. We came out at a town called Begoro about an hour before dark and chose to jump on the highway to blast back home. I don’t much like the roads or highways in Ghana but there was very little traffic so the trip home was not too bad. We made it back each having christened our bikes with a pretty good fall; Je on the first day south of Bousumtwi and me on the last. Paint scrapes and some tank gouges took some of the shiny off the new bikes but didn’t do any real damage.