It was a gorgeous-looking bike to behold and the stylish Italian gents went about explaining the design ethos behind the V85 TT, which they called a ‘classic travel enduro’. That evening, we got a first close-up view of the V85 TT during a presentation by a collection of dapper-looking gentlemen from Moto Guzzi in Italy.
I was having a thoroughly nice time, but I couldn’t quite figure out when I would actually be riding the motorcycle I’d travelled all this way for. Lunch was soon laid on, followed by a Prosecco reception. Once we landed in Cagliari, a minibus was waiting to take us to our hotel, the Is Molas Resort in Southern Sardinia. Anyway, a bunch of savvy bike journos can smell bullshit a mile off, so they had probably clocked my press launch virginity already. I landed at Cagliari airport more knowledgeable about the challenges to come over the next two days, and I’d learned yet again that honesty is the best policy. He looked at me and smiled, before spending the next few minutes explaining about the workings of motorcycle media launches. I’d now be a press pack pariah, but at least my conscience was clear.
I couldn’t hold my secret in any longer, so I blurted it out to a member of our group sat next to me. However, as I sat on the plane with a group of long-serving motorcycle journalism pros, I was starting to feel like the new kid at school who’d been moved up a year and was trying to fit in with the big boys. These experiences have helped me build up a bank of knowledge about travelling by motorcycle, both at home and abroad, which I now use to help inform and hopefully inspire ABR readers through the pages of this great magazine. I’ve commuted daily through chaotic city streets, scaled mountain passes, traversed rocky trails, and regularly battled adverse weather conditions that should have seen me leave the bike in the garage and take the car (I had no choice, I didn’t own a car). I’ve ridden tens of thousands of miles over the past few years.
Instead, it was because I love to travel by bike. You see, one of the reasons I’d managed to bag the best job in the world, writing for ABR, wasn’t because I’d already had a glittering career in the motorcycle press. I’d tried to reassure myself that I wasn’t a complete newbie. The fact I was now representing Adventure Bike Rider magazine and I was about to test a new adventure bike put, in my mind, a rather hefty weight of expectation on my shoulders to, well… know what I was doing. Actually, I had only been a full-time motorcycle journo for four months. My nervousness stemmed from the fact that, unlike the pack of experienced motorcycle journalists relaxing in their seats around me, I’d never attended the press launch of a new bike before.
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