Honda VFR 800 Motorcycle Tour | Hawes, Ribblehead Viaduct, North Yorkshire | Top Box Touring | 05

Honda VFR 800 Motorcycle Tour | Hawes, Ribblehead Viaduct, North Yorkshire | Top Box Touring | 05

In this video I take my VFR800 on a three day tour of the Skipton area of North Yorkshire with my wife riding pillion. Originally I intended to use the panniers that I have for this bike, but we decided to go minimalist and just use a top box.

Motorcycle touring does seem to have changed quite a bit since the advent of the Adventure Bike revolution. I have toured France and Germany on eighties bikes back in the, ‘erm, eighties. We would have a rack on the back, loaded up with your tent and sleeping bag, with throw over panniers with your clothes in. It was never comfortable, so you would rush to get there, but then ride the bike, naked, so to speak in different directions from your base. Now it seems more of an endurance race across the continent with 300 mile plus days, punctuated by night over stops along the way, racking up a couple of thousand miles in a week.

I have done more recent trips on modern sports tourers. But the sport side was definitely subservient to the tourer aspect, due to the loaded up Honda VFR 800 panniers that inevitably upset the handling of the bike. When my wife, who is usually responsible for loading up the panniers, suggested we look at reducing what we take to the contents of a motorcycle topbox, it sounded like a really good idea.

Whenever you start to pack panniers on a bike you always start to add a lot of contingency items. A choice of shoes, a coat in case it is cold, your laptop and charger, and lots of food. So this time we decided to really only take the essentials, underwear and socks for each day, a change of t-shirts, tooth brush, phone charger cable and a charge plug.

Luckily my wife also suggested taking waterproof trousers to go in the top box of the VFR800. I thought mine had been thrown away, but she knew exactly where they had been hiding for the past few years. I wasn’t sure about the waterproofs, because the weather forecast was so good. But typical English weather meant we had overnight thunderstorms on the last night so the roads were wet when we set off.

We booked the AirBnB quite late, but the price was quite good, and when we got there despite being quite small it had everything we needed. The only real issue was that access to the parking was over very deep gravel. It looked great but felt really dodgy riding the bike over it.

We stopped in Harrogate on the way there and the way back with a topbox full of washing. And like a lot of people took advantage of using the known quantity of Wetherspoons for our breakfast in each direction. We have an icky sticky test. If the tables look icky and feel a little sticky we tend to give the place a pass, and move on to somewhere else. In the event the Winter Gardens in Harrogate was really nice, a great ambience and the food was good.

Once we had found and booked into our airBNB we then went back out to Morrisons to fill the VFR800 top box with the sundry things we thought we would consume during our stay. Along with our evening meal, which we had by the canal in Skipton.

Our main day of touring took in Grassington, Aysgarth Falls, Hawes, the Ribblehead viaduct back to Skipton. A circuit of around 100 miles, on some of the best roads in the world, and it being mid-week mostly quite quiet. God’s own roads!

The last night had typical UK thunderstorms so we didn’t get away without some rain, but it didn’t actually fall on us so that was a blessing. Overall we had a great trip, greatly helped by the weather. As for minimalist packing we didn’t have a single moment of “I wish I’d brought”, so it must have been good. Certainly we could have added enough for another couple of nights without straining the space available.

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