Life gets more complicated as you grow older. In your teens it’s all so simple – you don’t seem to have a care in the world. The 20s you still want to have fun but fending for yourself starts to become a reality; you move out of home, get your first loan and need a steady income to pay for it. The 30s bring kids, a mortgage and responsibility. As the years pass your own passions fade to a distant memory and there’s less time spent in the shed…

My 40s have been spent driving my kids to karate and dancing; basically I feel like a bus service going from one activity to the next. The truth is I love it and wouldn’t change it for the world. Do I miss spending endless hours on my bike tearing up Australia? Well, yes I do, but life is a balance and you can’t have everything without consequence… or can you?

I got talking to Paul McCann at AMCN and found he was in a similar situation. Although he’s younger and doesn’t have kids, work deadlines and life’s everyday chores takes their toll. I think most people go through not having the time to do what they want as the distractions creep in. PMac and I needed a plan to put things right and came up with the catchphrase, ‘Two blokes, two days and two bikes’.

Most people can manage to find a free weekend in a year if they play their cards right, and with our time allocated we just needed to find some suitable bikes. Not any old bikes, though – we needed a couple of the best mid-size adventure bikes money could buy, the perfect machines for our weekend getaway: a BMW F800GS Adventure and a Triumph Tiger 800 XCA.

This was to be a serious head-clearing session. No hotels, no fancy restaurants, just a cheap, justifiable weekend away without breaking the bank. We didn’t want to mix with people, we didn’t want police interference, we just wanted
to get away from the routine.

We decided on an overnight jaunt, heading off at sparrow’s fart on a Saturday morning and getting home on Sunday night, ready for the Monday grind. It didn’t take much conversation to get the ball rolling and a quick plan was mapped out. We would start off from the AMCN office and make our way to the Alpine trout farm near Noojee, where we’d catch our dinner before twisting and carving our way to Fumina to make camp and tell some stories.

Read the full story in the current issue of AMCN on sale now