Just a Thursday evening ride

It's that time of year in the western cape when the wind blows out of the south for days on end, it gusts up to 100kmh down on the foreshore in Capetown, young girls either get blown off their feet or their skirts get wrapped around their heads so depending on your outlook and your transport, it can be a good time or a bad time to be down there.

It is however, a very difficult time to ride a motorbike there, you can quite easily be blown over and this nearly happened to us one day, how I managed to hold the bike up without busting a poopstring I'll never know, just sheer desperation I guess.

Now as we come into December things start calming down, the days are much longer; daylight lasts until after 20h00 and one needs to take advantage of lovely warm, calm summer evenings. People have various ways of doing this, some have a braai, some go for walks, although why anyone would walk when they have a perfectly good motorbike is beyond me! And so it was that yesterday evening we decided to go for a ride, we were both home fairly early from work and it was one of those beautiful still evenings with that peculiar quality of light from the setting sun that gives a brightness to the horizon but a chilly dusk to one's immediate surroundings.

Comfortably attired we roared out of town, the setting sun to our left as we headed out towards the next town; Vredenburg. I had no destination in mind, the intention was to ride for a while and then decide on somewhere to have dinner. It was a lovely feeling, the road was not busy, most of the local people were already at home and the big red machine was performing effortlessly, as we neared the town I lifted my visor and shouted to Janet "What about Modo Mio in Paternoster?"

Paternoster is what was once a small fishing village some 15kms from Vredenburg, when we first moved into the area it was a 15km gravel road and the place remained quaint and relatively unchanged but then the road was tarred and things changed drastically. Suddenly literally hundreds of holiday homes sprang up, several restaurants and guest houses appeared and the place lost its special charm. It is still well worth a visit though.

Modo Mio is one of our favourites and Janet was happy to go there again. As we cruised down towards the coast long shadows crossed the road and a heavy fog bank hung over the sea.

I used the ride as an opportunity to further test my action camera and I must say the results are pretty pleasing, some nice shots of Paternoster in the evening.

At the restaurant Janet went for the "Modo Mio steak", a piece of sirloin wrapped in bacon and fried in breadcrumbs, very tasty and with lovely thin, well fried chips - most of that steak is in our fridge now for me to eat!

My Seafood platter consisted of mussels, hake, prawns, calamari and those same thin, well fried chips - very good, and we will be back.
We sat for a while chatting and finishing our wine in the fading light and then it was time to kick-start the big red machine and head for home.

Long shadows by then and quite cold but very refreshing and what a pleasure to be out on a motorbike, 15kms to Vredenburg and 13kms to Saldanha.

I wound it up on the way into town but apparently not fast enough for my lady, when we pulled up outside the house she said "I thought you were going to open it up a bit on the last stretch!"
What a pleasant end to the day and the thing is that if we had a car we wouldn't bother to go out, there's something special about this kind of trip on a motorbike which is quite difficult to explain, I do try and I will keep trying to put it into words......stay with me, but those of you who do ride will know what I'm talking about.