Silly sausages
Get up early, assemble with foolish mates, ride for a full English on ace old bikes – there’s no more joyous way to start any day. We go in search of the UK’s biggest breakfast…
LEG 1 Early morning alarm to Newark services
Sausages, bacon and fried eggs are essential, and if they’re accompanied by mushrooms and black pudding then all the better. Oh, and beans and tomatoes, all washed down with piping hot tea (milk, no sugar). Food is my weak spot, and a hearty full English always overpowers my laughable willpower. And, of course, it always tastes much better when you’ve ridden out to get it.
Dawn starts and a crisp, sunny trundle for brekkie are woven into the fabric of British biking. We all do it because… well, because it’s a cracking excuse to spend time with like-minded idiots, riding your bikes on roads that are still quiet. For me, it’s even better now we’re deep into autumn as the chilled morning air makes the artery-worrying target feel even more rewarding.
Which is why today I’m the first one up and creeping out the house to extract my Yamaha TDR250 from under the fizzing strip lights of my rubbish garage. The forecast on optimistic-weather.com promises clear skies and a full sun to burn off the mist loitering in the fields, and so I’m heading north-east to meet Bike designer Paul Lang and ex-editor John Westlake. Think I’ll have hash browns, too.
This morning’s shenanigans are a little different to our usual early-morning calorie hunt. Instead of going to one of our favourite bacon-scented destinations (see Bikes, Berks and Brekkie, over the page), today we’re heading somewhere different. Part of the reason is so we can ride unknown roads, but the main reason is because we’re looking for Shepherd’s Place Farm near Doncaster – home of the biggest fry-up in the country. In fact, make that the world. Universe, probably.
Assembly point with the other two silly sausages is a dull service station on the A1 just north of Newark. It’s a 30-odd-minute scurry, zinging along deserted back lanes and B-roads before a dash up the multi-lane A46. Seeing lots of bright round suns all over the weather forecast, I shun my heated kit having made the decision that it’ll only be nippy for the first few miles. My two-stroke TDR loves the crisp, cool, dense morning air and romps gleefully into its powerband. My chilled fingers aren’t so sure.
I enjoy early morning starts – the wispiness draped over fields, the sense of the day to come – but riding at dawn can be as dodgy as riding at dusk. Encountering the first bits of morning traffic climbing up out of the Vale of Belvoir, I’m merr
