I am now 3 days away from the start of my RTW motorcycle trip.

It seems like every waken moment of my life over the last 3 - 4 months has been dedicated to getting ready for this trip.

I just recently retired from a 40 year career spent working as a geologist and computer analyst, with the last 24 years spent working with the Canadian government.

I have been a motorcyclist enthusiast my entire life. I went off on my first major road trip back in 1977, where I spent an entire year touring around Canada, the US,Central America, Europe and parts of Africa, After that trip, I was hooked for life on motorcycling.

Over the next 38 years I continued to tour across many parts of the world,
but as enjoyable as those experiences were they left me wanting to spend more than just a few weeks a year on some Fly and Ride trip to Europe or South America.

I longed for spending more time exploring the world and would read with envy ride reports posted on the HUBB and AdvRider websites of those adventurers out there riding their motorcycles around the world.

Now that I am in retirement what better time to embark on a RTW trip.

Over the course of the last three months I have been busy planning my trip itinerary, sorting out my gear, preparing my BMW 1150 GS. It has been a monumental task.

View my travel blog for trip preparation https://ride4adventureblog.wordpress.com/

My 2003 BMW R1150 GS


Sorting out my gear for the Trip


This Monday I will be dropping off my motorcycle with Air Canada at their cargo terminal in Montreal. (I live in Ottawa) The following day I will fly out to Ireland to meet up with my bike and if everything goes well I will start my journey. I can't wait !!

Good Luck Brian,
I'll be following your journey with envy.

Thanks Troppy

It will be a fantastic feeling once I have landed in Ireland and start up the beemer for the start of the trip

Cheers

Brian

Hi Brian,

Good luck for the trip. If your north of Manchester ( between Manchester and Burnley) and would like a bed for the night then please look us up.

Jayne


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Jane

Thanks for your kindly invite. I am not sure if I will make it over to England along my route. But you never know.

I look forward to meeting up with members of the Horizons community who share in the spirit of adventure motorcycling.

Cheers

Brian

Well I am today one step closer to realizing the start of my RTW trip.

Today I dropped off my BMW at the Air Canada Cargo facility in Montreal.
It is now slated to be flown over to Ireland on Tuesday, a day before I fly out.

I was on the road this morning at 6:30 riding the bike from my home in Ottawa to Montreal. It is only a distance of 180 kms between the two cities and usually on a good day it is a non-eventual ride. But this morning the temperature was just above freezing. Along the entire ride I was facing a 40-50 km wind, so I was having to ride at a hard tack into the cross breeze. Not much fun. At the half way point of my trip, it started snowing, even less fun. I know I live in a Nordic climate here in Ottawa, but geez its mid May not mid February. I hope its a lot warmer over in Ireland. What were my Irish ancestors thinking when they left Ireland for Canada? Well actually they thought the boat they were getting onto was headed for Boston and not the wild frozen tundra of Canada.

It was so cold this morning that I had to pull over an stop at a coffee shop to warm up before I could continue along my way.

For those of your planning to ship your motorcycles across the pond to Europe from Canada or US, here is a quick recap of my experience.

Air Canada - Canada's favorite airline ( well not really) has a special program that they have introduced, called "Fly Your Bike". For about half the normal shipping rate they will fly your motorcycle from most major cities in Canada and (some US cities ?) to Dublin, London, Paris or Frankfurt.

There is a caveat to this program, you must agree to fly both yourself and the bike over to Europe. If you choose to fly on another airline, they will charge you an extra $500 CDN to you shipping costs.

I paid Air Canada $1060 to ship my bike over to Dublin.

To ship the bike I needed to provide AC Cargo with a dangerous goods certificate, which I had to get from another 3rd patry group, that costs me an additional $150 for the document.

This morning I rode in and met the rep from the company that provides the DG document. We filled out the form then headed over to the Airport, rode the bike at the AC cargo facility, had it weighed, security inspection done, That was it. Simple!!

My experience in shipping my bike with Air Canada was pretty painless. I did not have to disconnect my battery leads. The fuel tank had to be at least 1/4 full or less. I was able to leave my tools, spare parts, motorcycle boots, jacket etc packed into my panniers. So long as I did not have any flammable or pressurized goods stored on bike, they had no issue with shipping the bike with all my gear on it. They told me that the cargo hold was pressurized, so I did not have to deflate my tires.

I was really surprised when they weighed my BMW 1150 GS. I know the motorcycle specs show a bike weight of 560 lb - 254 kg (wet) but damn!! my bike weighed in at 638 lb - 290 kg, and I still have 40 lbs of extra weight for my BMW seat bag and camping gear. And that weight was with only a 1/4 tank of fuel.

Bike weighs almost as much as a freaking Harley Davidson.

Day 2 - Wexford Ireland


Finally I arrived in Ireland. After a gruelling 8 hours spent in flying from Ottawa to London, then a short flight from London to Dublin. I am now finally in Ireland.

I had no issue with immigration control, and the airlines managed not to lose my baggage.
Which is a good beginning to the start of any trip.

After collecting my luggage I went to search for my motorcycle which had been shipped out the previous day to Dublin. I had no idea who had my bike or what the process was for importing it into the country. All Air Canada told me in Montreal was that I would just need to show the Waybill form to the cargo people over at the Dublin airport and I would get my bike. Well !! that is not the full process.
I went and talked to customer service from Aer Lingus, they are the airline that I had flown in on from London, they did not know anything about the bike, they told me another company Swissport dealt with Air Canada Cargo. They gave me directions to their cargo facility which was a 10 minute walk from the main airport terminal, well actually its more like a 15 minute walk if you are carry 60 lbs of luggage. I eventually found the offices for Swissport, when I presented my WayBill shipping form, they told me that they could not release the motorbike until I received a customs release form. The customs office is located on the second floor of the Aer Lingus Cargo terminal which is just up the street from Swissport.

OK .. 10 minutes later I am seated in front of a customs clerk telling him that I want to temporarily import a motorcycle into Ireland for a 2 week tour before heading over to France for continuation of my RTW trip.

The first utterances from the customs officer were, "Well this could be a problem ! Do you have a return plane ticket out of Ireland " Ahh No
I am planning on taking the ferry boat from Ireland to France.

"Well then, can you showed me that you have a booked passage on this ferry over to France".. Ahh No.. but I planning on buying one.

" Mr. Kennedy what proof can you give me that you will ever take this bike out of Ireland ? Can you give me any evidence that you have a planned itinerary for your trip ?

I gave him the URL to my trip blog Ride4Adventureblog. He went away for 5 minutes and then return. He gave me a one page form to fill out, and 10 minutes later I had an official customs release for the bike.

I brought the customs release form back to the admin offices for Swissport, they typed up another document, charged me 95 Euros for handling charges.
With the release document now in hand I headed back over to the Swissport cargo hanger and got my bike.

Thankfully nothing outwardly seemed damaged. It took me another half hour to sort out my gear and get it loaded onto the bike, just as I am about to depart it starts pissing down, these were monsoon rains, welcome to Ireland one of the air cargo workers told me. The rain let up pretty quickly. I had booked a B&B not more that 10 minutes away from the airport. As I am riding along the Hwy from the airport to the town of Swords just north of the airport, a motorcyclist flags me over at one of the traffic lights. He was following me from behind and thought he saw what looked like a cell phone flying off the back of the bike and then got run over by half a dozen vehicles.

In the rush to load up my gear I forgot that I left my cell phone on top of one of my bags. Well!! I am glade I brought along the cheapest cell phone that I could find for the trip. I stopped and retraced my route hoping that my phone had some how miraculously survived, I was able to quickly located my lost phone but unfortunately it was now distributed over a 10 foot radius along Hwy 132.

I never liked that phone anyways.

I had no problems adjusting to riding on the left hand side or as the Americans would say "On the wrong side of the road". I spent the day riding south down from Dublin to Wexford. I missed my turnoff for the M50 ring road that circles around Dublin, at that point my GPS decided to gave me a free tour of Dublin city, damn they have a lot traffic lights and traffic circles in Dublin.

Tomorrow I head out to Kinsale which is the starting point for the "Wild Atlantic Way". The WAW is a marked route that follows the coastline of Ireland following along all the little backroads along the coast. From other bikers I have talked to who have ridden the route, you get to see some of the best scenery to be found in Ireland.

Killarney Ireland - May 25, 2016

I am now into day 6 of my tour around Ireland. The only reason I am keeping track of what day it is, is because I have a ferry passage booked from Rosslare to Cherbourg France for June 1st. While I was visiting the town of Wexford, which is just north of the ferry terminal where the boats depart for France, the owner of the B&B where I was staying, informed me that one of the two ferry companies, Stenna Ferries and Irish Ferries were experiencing problems with one of their boats. Irish Ferries was having to pick up the slack for Stenna ferries. The owner at the B&B, suggested that I book my ferry passage now, otherwise I could have problems when it comes time to trying to book a sailing from Ireland to France.

One of the main things that attracted me to come to Ireland, was to experience riding around the coastal roads along the western regions of Ireland. I have many a story from other riders about what a joy it was to ride the back roads of Ireland.

As part of an effort to attract more tourists to Ireland, someone came up with the idea of developing a driving route around the scenic parts of the Atlantic side of Ireland, and started promoting it the Wild Atlantic Way. The WAW is a 2500 km route from Donegal in the north to Kinsale in the south. The Irish tourist board in recent years have been heavily promoting this scenic driving route. Well their strategy seems to be working as it lured me over here.

I have read about the WAW route in a number of popular Adventure Motorcycle journals, it seemed like an interesting challenge to take on, and as I was interested in visiting Ireland, this seemed like a good opportunity to experience it for myself.

The first few days of my trip have been spent in just trying to get down from Dublin to Kinsale, where the WAW route begins.

So far on my trip I have been impressed with the level of accommodations that I have found. The B&B that I stayed in in Dublin and Wexford, were both top notch. For my 3rd day in Ireland, I had planned on staying in a B&B north of Kinsale in a little village called Ballinadee, but as it turned out, there was a local wedding going on and by the time I arrived, the B&B where I had reserved a room, had decided to give my room up to one of the wedding parties guests, I was a bit bummed out about his,so they offered me a free stay at another guest farm somewhere out in the country. The guest house that I was suppose to stay at in Ballinadee was about as remote as you can find in Ireland, the guest farm that the owner of the previous B&B brought me to was down a trail off of a goat track off a road that did not even show up on my GPS. I have no idea how guests would ever find their way to this out of the way B&B.


Farm House I stayed at neat Ballinadee Ireland

[IMG]DSC_0006 by Brian Kennedy, on Flickr[/IMG]

The guest house was a working dairy farm. The B&B was run by a couple who were at least in their early 90's.

Photo of my room. Owner said that the farm has existed on this site since 1742.

Last time the place was renovated was back in 1950's. I am not sure that pink bathroom porcelain will every come back into fashion again. Because of the hash up with my booking, I got to stay at this place for free, so anytime I get something for free, I won't complain.

[IMG]DSC_0620 by Brian Kennedy, on Flickr[/IMG]

The start of my WAW ride really did not start until I arrived in Ballylickey which is just near the Beara Peninsula. If you look at a map of western Ireland you will see a number of peninsulas jutting out from the mainland, the route of the Wild Atlantic Way follows along the coastal roads of these peninsulas.

The last three days I have ridden around the entire length of the Beara Peninsula and the Ring of Kerry. The roads and scenery have been nothing sort of spectacular. The roads have been a mix of the good the bad and the ugly. Irish roads were built for motorcycling, I especially enjoyed riding some sections of the N70 and N71, nice tarmac and lots of curves.

The videos below give you a sense of what to expect when riding around
the Wild Atlantic Way.

Video of my ride around Beara Peninsula


Video of my ride around Ring of Kerry


Some Photos Along the WAW

Stop along route 572 Glandore Harbour


Glandore Harbour


Stop at village of Castletown



Around main harbour in Castletown



Along coast of Beara Peninsula heading west to Dursey Head



Stop near Garnish point



On top of Healy Pass. Ride up to top was fantastic.



Just an interesting scene on ride along R572 back to Ballylickey.



Some photos along route N71 between Ballylickey and Kemare
Really interesting section of route. Takes you trhough nature preserve and mountain pass.



Some scenes from ride along Ring of Kerry











I have been spending the last few days lazing about in Killarney, taking a bit of a break from riding the bike. Killarney is a bit of a tourist trap, everybody comes here to drive around the Ring of Kerry. For my money I preferred riding around the Beara Peninsula. Less traffic and scenery is just as spectacular. Less chance of getting stuck behind some slow moving RV.

Downtown Killarney

Great adventure. Someday I would like do something similar.

Al

It has now been over 2 weeks since I returned to Canada from Germany. I departed Frankfurt Germany along with my motorcycle.

I spent 3 days in Frankfurt Germany getting the motorcycle prepared for its journey back to Canada. I had no time to spend in playing tourist as I was busy getting bike ready for trip back to Canada. I had already made arrangements with Air Canada Cargo over a month ago to have the motorcycle air freighted from Frankfurt Germany to Montreal.

I spent a full two days getting the bike cleaned up. I know that both Agriculture Canada and Customs Canada would be involved in the process of clearing my motorcycle back into the country and did not what to chance that some over zealous inspector would refused*to release my motorcycle*because they found some*clump of dirt or found an insect fragment struck to the bike**I remember *once returning from a trip to the Bahamas and having one of my running shoes confiscated because they found some tar like substance*stuck to the bottom of my sneaker.



View of downtown Frankfurt as viewed from my hotel room. I*am not sure what is going on with all* the buildings being adorned with colored cones??[/caption]

The process for shipping the motorcycle back from* Germany to Canada was similar to that I experienced* I had when I first flew the bike from Montreal to Dublin Ireland.

First thing I had to do was to Contact Air Canada Cargo office in Frankfurt Germany . Both my bike and myself would be retuning to Canada on the same day. The motorcycle would be shipped out on an earlier more direct flight from Frankfurt to Montreal. I would fly out a few hours later, taking AC flight from Frankfurt - Toronto - Montreal. The AC Cargo agent told me that if both bike and myself arrived as scheduled,*I should be able to get the bike cleared through Canada Customs on the same day.

AC Cargo told me to drop the bike off at their Cargo facility, located at the* Frankfurt Intl airport. Frankfurt Airport is a very large airport. The AC offices are found by entering through gate 26 (TOR 26) which is just west of Terminal 1 and 2. Entrance to the airport cargo facilities is restricted, so*you* need to sign in with the main control office which is to your immediate right as you enter the entrance to gate 26. The Air Canada Cargo building is at 455a, just turn left along the main road once your pass through the security barrier.

Before I could drop off the bike at Air Canada Cargo*I *had to first get a dangerous goods certificate for the bike. AC Cargo gave me the name of a DG agent ( Deufol - 638 Cargo City Sud) the company is*located*on the south side of*the airport. I contacted Deufol**a week before*coming to *Frankfurt, they had the paper work prepared in advance of my arrival. For that piece of paper they charge me 40 euros ($60.00 Cdn), cheaper than the $100.00 I was charged when I first fly the bike over to Ireland.

I* was surprised to learn that the cost of sending my bike back to Canada was the same as what I paid to first ship it over to Ireland. When I first discussed the details*of the*" Fly Your Bike" promotion with Air Canada representatives, I was told that the low fares only applied to flights from Canada to Europe and not between Europe and North America, but apparently it*must, as I was charged the same rate on the return shipment.

To get the special Air Canada promotion rate, you must book your return flight with Air Canada. If you do not, they will charge you an extra $400.00 to the cost of your bike shipment. I got hosed by Air Canada when trying to arrange a flight back to Montreal. Air Canada as does many of the major airlines, charge a huge premium on single flight bookings on*their major international routes. I landed up booking a return ticked from Frankfurt to Montreal as the cost of a single fare between* Frankfurt and Montreal was twice that of a return ticket.

The day before I was scheduled to fly out, I dropped the bike off at the Air Canada building, I signed a few more documents, paid them a bunch money, they gave me a Waybill number for the cargo shipment, and that was it! There was a bike in* the cargo holding area that was just shipped back from the US t Frankfurt. They just load the bike on the aluminum pallet, and then*secure *it to the pallet using 4- 5*ratchet straps.



In Air Canada Cargo facility art Frankfurt airport, getting motorcycle prepped for shipment back to Canada[/caption]



Motorcycles are strapped down to an aluminum pallet for loading onto airplane[/caption]

I flew out the next day, I arrived in Montreal early in the afternoon. I had no idea where the Air Canada customs facility was. I managed to track down a customs agent at the airport who made a few phone calls and located my motorcycle. Canada customs has a warehouse facility a few kilometers from the main airport, I was directed to go there. It should have only taken 10 minutes to get there by taxi but my driver was a bit clueless in trying to*find his way over to the Canada Customs office, he initially try to drop me off in front of a vacant lot, insisting that this was the* right*address as directed by his company's GPS unit. I pulled out my own GPS and*proceeded to *direct him the correct location. No tip for you !!

Once I was at the Canada Custom office, it was just a matter of making a custom declaration on the bike and all the contents that were stored in the side panniers. I was in and out of the office in about 15 minutes with the customs release form. I handed this off to one of the Air Canada cargo reps and 10 minutes later my bike was delivered to the front loading door. The whole process was pretty painless, no high drama.



The Canada Customs office, just down the hallway to the left, only about a 15 minute walk[/caption]

Once back in Montreal I headed back to my home in Ottawa. I have decided to take a hiatus from my tour and attend to some personal*matters, I am relocating from Ottawa to Fredericton, New Brunswick. I sold my house in Ottawa before my trip and have now downsized to a condo in Fredericton.* My travels will continue but instead of travelling for extended periods of time I may now limit my travels to 3 or 4 weeks at a time instead. The world is a big place, no need to try and see it all at once.

Thanks Ride4Adventure,
I'm planning to ship my bike into Dublin this year w ACan from Vancouver, so your clear description of procedure helps a lot.