Timings were tight - night comes in earlier now, autumn is here! Lovely night under the stars though and great little roads to be riding on. For me - can't beat coffee before stripping down a campsite...
Been well over a month since I managed a camping trip on my Bonnie. Got my tyre fixed this week, booked into a campsite a couple hours away - immediately feel tension leaving my body... Edit; It's a spoked wheel with an inner tube...
I'm planning a bike ride from London, through Europe and into the edges of Turkey. Looks like about 8 days of travel to get there, stay there for two or three days then turn around and ride back to London. I'm confident with the kit, I'll mix main roads for mile-chomping with nice A/B roads and some nice diversions and mix camping with hotels, B&B etc. I'm using FURKOT to build a trip (just roughly at the moment - "big handfuls") which is the attached photo, but it's beginning to take shape enough for me to get good info and dig into some details. The basics of border crossing I've got covered but I'm trying to find those things that you don't know that you should know, if you get my drift.
EDIT: The point of this is to make a hard journey to Turkey, it's not to visit anywhere on the way. If I can pull off the timing, there's a family connection where I'm going but the timing is important. Hopefully I'll fly my mother out, meet her there for a few days then head home. What I don't have is any experience on roads towards eastern Europe - Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria - and I'm trying to get a feel for it before I commit to a route. Good or bad areas to stop, fuel prices and quality, general road security, border crossing etc. If anyone has experience over there please throw me some wisdom/advice!
So a company called Carpuride sent me a Carplay screen to test and review for free. I'd been using a Quadlock for a while but I've been getting frustrated with the rate of phone charge and it seemed to be dropping wireless charge when it vibrates - so I was already considering something like this. What's everyone else's experiences with these units, same or similar brand? I'm impressed so far...
I've noticed that there's often people who manage to breeze past the minimum watch hours for YPP but struggle to get the subs, and at the same time almost as many people with the opposite problem - plenty of subs but not enough watch hours.
From these forums the suggestion for getting the subs (if you're a long-form channel) quicker is to try throwing out more short-form provided you keep them tightly within your niche. Has anyone actually had success with that addition? Or do we feel the conversion isn't worth the work?
I can't recommend this enough - the ability we have to jump on a bike, zip off and have some personal down time and still be in work in the morning is worth its weight in gold! One night, one bag, one steak, one beer!
Added a headlight grille and gave myself much better access to the chain;
Tuesday night. Took my T120 an hour out of London to a campsite. Had steak. Hiding behind the potatoes is a cream and whiskey sauce.
30-odd degrees C in London - needed to get that airflow going!
Breakfast was ok, could have done without the insects, then the pub was closed when I needed a cold drink - turns out all I needed was the Bonnie and the road!
Long have I bebeen trapped in the warp. Much has changed and my forces have dwindled! How do I make any of this work in 11th??!!
What do I keep? What can't be fielded?
I FEAR MY PAINTS HAVE ALL DRIED!!!
5 man Tactical Squad
5 man Scout Squad
3 Bikey Boys
7 Death Company
Astorath The Flappy
Librarian Dread 😭, Flappy Banner Guy
Baal Predator
LT with Sword of Poke
3 man Inceptor Squad
5 man Intercessor
5 man Hellblasters
1st born Libby Captain w Thunder hammer and heavy bolt pistol(?)
1st born Slam Captain 😭
Captain in Gravis armour
Plus other odds n sods - 9 more Intercessors, another Inceptor, a couple more Death Company in a box, another bike in a box and two Land Speeders...
GUIDE ME OUT OF THIS MADNESS!!!
I toured 9 days from London to Scotland around the NC500 and back on a Triumph Bonneville, camping every night. I share my packing mistakes and lessons learned, and why carrying a full moto camping cooking setup was a total waste of space thanks to amazing Scottish food.
Is this standard for a short? I was expecting the curve to... curve. It just seems to have completely flattened... Looks like it got watched for about 3 hours then pulled.
With the NC500 behind me and Rory's Harley Davidson in front of me, we leave Glencoe and head East before turning south towards Glasgow. Some delicious food keeps us focused until Rory leaves me all alone on the boring motorway headed to Orcaber Campsite (if it's not busy, they won't do pizza!!) in the Yorkshire Dales for one last night of camping before home.
Any recommendations for a nice tank bag for a T120 Bonneville??
The seventh day of my journey riding from London, around the Scottish North Coast 500 and back, camping all the way.
Today we leave Applecross and take the Long Way Round before cutting across Scotland and into Inverness across the Kessock Bridge, closing my first NC500 loop. We push on, riding down the shores of Loch Ness and stop to pay our respects at the Commando Memorial at Spean Bridge, before finishing the day off with pizza in Glencoe.
The seventh day of my journey riding from London, around the Scottish North Coast 500 and back, camping all the way. Today we leave Applecross and take the Long Way Round before cutting across Scotland and into Inverness across the Kessock Bridge, closing my first NC500 loop. We push on, riding down the shores of Loch Ness and stop to pay our respects at the Commando Memorial at Spean Bridge, before finishing the day off with pizza in Glencoe.
I leave the huge beaches of Sands campsite in Gairloch on my Triumph Bonneville and ride south through the gorgeous highland scenery to try and beat the bad weather to the infamous Bealach na Ba pass, leading to Applecross. Hoping to meet my friend Rory on the way, but he has much further to come - will he beat the weather and make it up the pass on his Harley Davidson?
The Bealach na Ba used to be the route cattle would be driven between the villages of Tornapress and Applecross in Wester Ross. The pass itself is a single lane road, 11 miles long, and in the middle its hairpin bends climb from sea level to over 630 metres within 6km, creating gradients around 20%, and has the steepest ascent of the roads in the whole of the UK.
1,658 miles on a Triumph Bonneville, around the country in 9 days of riding, camping every night. From London, round the NC500 and back again, this was day 5. The riding through the Scottish highlands was stunning and some of the most fun riding I've ever done. The two campsites I used on this day (waking up at Scourie and finishing at Sands) are both incredible and get a huge recommend.
Would love to hear others thoughts/experience on this.
I have a subscription to Envato mostly so I can use background/ambient music. I've had a couple of "copyright" notifications and to be honest, due to the wording of the messages and the green ticks, I initially thought I didn't think I needed to do anything. After all, I've already paid for usage. But (stupidly) I was forgetting that the platforms don't always talk to each other. Short story - if you don't dispute the claim and demonstrate paying for use then the originator/owner can still claim all of your ad-revenue from those videos. Now, I'm just starting so that doesn't bother me, but here's the kicker - when you dispute the claim you send your receipt of purchase (downloaded copyright permission from Envato in this case) through the YouTube system and the owner has 30 days to respond! So if I'm reading this right, you'd still lose the revenue from your first 30 days? This sounds crazy to me.
As an addendum, Envato have now built automatic copyright clearing into the system and it looks like for those specific packages you download the clearance is instant.
I wanted to share what I've started using as a guideline for editing and posting my clips. I'm fairly new to treating my channel like a proper creators channel rather than just sharing videos with family so made an effort to follow a process. Let me know what I'm missing or throw in some details for me! Based on motovlogging and camping trips so far, roughly 8 - 13 minutes ballpark so far;
File management - Go through all usable captured footage, rename to order by number and dump it into a project folder. Dump that into DaVinci Resolve. Do a quick scrub through and delete stuff that is either boring or already covered in another clip.
"Big Handfuls edits" - cut down longer clips so the whole timeline is more condensed.
Colour, crop, straighten, zoom
Start working on narration (I don't have a decent mic setup yet to capture live, will sort)
Consider scores
Tighter edit, bringing down that run time, distilling the better footage, match edits to beat of the score where appropriate
(Here I'll massage 4/5/6 together as I go)
Create thumbnail, "endcard" moment, look forward, "call to action"
Export
Upload to Private
Check details - description, title, thumbnail, links, copyright, tags, end-card links
Set release time - same time every week
Engage with all comments within first couple of hours, try for all within first couple of days/week.
Review results, be critical, adjust, try and improve.
An addendum is that I have fairly crappy old video equipment for this which I'm in the process of replacing, so I guess that falls into "improve"!