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There is a very fine line between insanity and inspiration, you could almost call it a tight rope…get it wrong and disaster will follow, but get it right and then the feeling cannot be bettered. Nick Sanders is a man who very much got it right and has enjoyed a truly remarkable life. He shared his stories with an enthralled audience at my local bike shop a couple of nights ago. From a humble, even dour, upbringing in the North West of England something within has driven him to always push to do amazing things…he left home at 17 to live in France in order to try and a make a buck as pro racing cyclist, living on his wits. Later he cycled around the world in a record time, traversing continents with the same amount of fuss we make about driving to the shops.
The man himself…mid flowA few years along the line he rode an Enfield motorbike around the world having blagged one from the UK importer for nothing. I got the impression he was not keen on the poor old Enfield and eventually hung the poor old thing from the bottom of a hot air balloon as a makeshift basket…as you would. Some of the stories he told were truly hilarious…the tale of the poor sod who dangled from the underside of his balloon basket whilst being dragged through cow pats will live with me for many a day.
Keen to meet Sir Richard Branson who was about to launch one of his epic balloon adventures he talked a national newspaper into paying his airfare to Japan. He casually mentioned that he then cycled across Japan to meet him like it was something any of us would naturally do…
I knew that he was an accomplished cyclist before this evening, but I knew nothing of his ballooning life and he later foray into canal narrow boats. Typically chugging along at 4mph to Gas Street Basin wasn’t he had in mind…oh, no…he took a barge from from the Black Sea back across Europe, including passing through the midst of the Yugoslavian civil war and traversing the English channel, He only sunk it once….As you might expect he did all this largely at the expense of a sponsor, this time British Waterways. He reason for scrounging the boat and doing the trip…he needed somewhere to live.
Here the story becomes more familiar to us bikers as in the mid 1990’s he completed a series of around the world trips in startling times on a series of Triumphs…In more recent years he has smashed the world record for traversing the globe, doing the distance in a little over 19 days…staggering. He did this time not on a adventure bike laden with kit and the backing a small army (LWR???), but on a Yamaha R1 with less gear on it than I took to my biking trip to Spain last year.
He has since repeated that journey and crossed the Sahara desert on the R1 before progressing to a Yamaha Tenere in recent years. Nick Sanders is a truly remarkable man, borderline barmy for sure, but he has led a life that many of us envy…any one of his adventures easily eclipses anything I have done on a bike.
Thankfully he is a eloquent story teller and raconteur and his adventures are imparted with a cheeky grin and a twinkle in his eye
Friendly chap tooIf you get a chance to see him on his tour of Yamaha dealers nationwide, snap it up.
Thanks to:
Ses310, Thumper and old friend Andy M for coming along
Kidderminster Motorcycle Mart https://www.motorcyclemart.co.uk/ for laying the evening and free nibbles and drinks
Yamaha UK for sponsoring such a legend!It really was a great night! And what an interesting guy, I could have stayed and listened all night.
Great write up as usual and you didn’t disappoint with the typos
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