Spain On Twins » General

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SOT — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:50:40 +0000

This is a short video I’ve recorded today, during a stop I made on the road. Finally we have no rain, and could ride again. I hope you like it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1l9dujmds0

If you can’t see the video, click here to watch it.

See you on the road !!

Have a look !!

SOT — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:29:58 +0000

I received some comments, via S.O.T.’s facebook and S.O.T.’s twitter, on the last post and on the video it shows, asking me to show a little more of the area where I recorded the video. And as I usually do as you tell me, here it is another video !! But it has an extra bonus. Instead of just showing the area, what I’m showing is some kilometers of one of the roads that we’ll be riding on the Twists & Twins tour, to be held in June 2010. It was recorded on a greyish and rainy day, but it looks gorgeous anyway. I hope you like it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoPdikFoH7M

And you know, if you are interested in riding the area on your Harley, in June we’ll be crossing Spain from Coast to Coast riding the Pyrenees. On 2010 we’ll be riding from San Sebastian to Barcelona. Lots of twists, lots of great mountain passes and superb roads like the one shown on the video. Add to this great hotels, nice food, cold beer and a group of Harley lovers and you have a picture of Spain On Twins‘ tours. And as we get to Barcelona, Harley-Davidson Spain will be opening the 2nd edition of the Barcelona Harley Days, so plenty of fun, music and great opportunities for a special weekend if you feel like it.

Hope to see you around here in June.

See you on the road !!

PS.- If you are reading this post in a Page that doesn’t show embebed videos, click here to watch it. Enjoy it !!

A mental ride

SOT — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:23:28 +0000

Although it is not the typical image you might have in your mind when you think about Spain, believe me if I tell you that what appears on the video is Spain. It’s located in the Pyrenees, in the North of Spain, and is a village I particularly like a lot. I’ve been spending some days there, among friends, and on the last day of 2009 I recorded a video to wish you all the best for 2010, that I’ve finally been able to upload. I hope you like it. Don’t be too cruel with your comments regarding its quality. It’s my first attemp at recording and editing video…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rShfeF4HKS8

If you want to have a look at the village where I recorded it, and get to know the roads around here, we’ll be riding them as part of the Twists&Twins Tour by mid June. Altough I’m now re-routing all the tours to make them shorter (and more affordable too…), this particular village will probably be the finish line for one leg on 2010. Check the site for updates if you are interested. It’s a superb area, with amazing roads I’m sure you’ll love to ride on your Harley.

All the best for 2010.

Hope to see you around here, with your Harley, soon.

PS.- If the video doesn’t show up (sometimes some pages like facebook and others don’t show videos…), you can click here to watch it.

Is it about time for a new bike ??

SOT — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 07:43:58 +0000

I still don’t have the answer, but the truth is that I’m thinking about it more than ever. Doing more than 20.000 k (12.500 miles) last year on my ‘97 FatBoy has been a mixture of pleasure and pain. Several break downs, a growing pain on my back, tons of mosquitoes and other flying objects on my face as well as countless hours of fun and joy on the road are driving my mind into paying growing attention to baggers. Lately I reckon that I tend to look with more loving eyes to Street Glides and Ultra Classics. Both have pros, both have cons. But my main barrier is that I don’t want to sell my present bike. I’d love to keep it, so as to further customize it without having to keep the long distance tours in mind. Taken that into account, an Ultra Classic seem to be the perfect fit. A bike where my girlfriend can travel in comfort, and with plenty of room for everything a woman seem to NEED to take with her even for the shortest ride. And that’s a lot of things. On the other side, the Street Glide look to me more like “my style”, but I feel is less adequate for duo riding, and I’d love to travel with my girlfriend more often.

Obviously, money is another barrier for making this come true. I just hope that lots of you come to Spain next year and do any of the tours I am preparing at Spain On Twins, so that, besides earning a little of the money I need for the buy, I also have the perfect excuse to tell my girlfriend when she discovers that I’ve signed yet another loan at the bank. “Honey, this is not for me. This is for us. This is for the business….”

While this moment comes, you can watch a nice commercial presentation of the 2010 models done by the MoCo. Nice new models. I’d probably buy them all if I could…

Ride Safe.

See you on the road !

Good news for our Pyrenees tour in 2010

SOT — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:51:45 +0000

The other day I read on twitter something that made me really happy. Harley-Davidson Spain has finally managed to close a deal with Barcelona’s authorities to celebrate again the Barcelona Harley Days. It will be on June (18-20) next year. I attended the 1st Barcelona Harley Days on 2008 and it was a great experience, with more than 15.000 Harleys, and more than 300.000 visitors….

To have the Barcelona Harley Days confirmed is good news for us, because I’ll move our tour calendar so as to make dates match, and have the opportunity to enjoy such a great meeting after a week of nice riding around our Spanish Pyrenees on your Harley. So now you know, the Twists & Twins tour will again take place on June 2010, starting at San Sebastian, and arriving at Barcelona on time for the Barcelona Harley Days.

In case you want to taste a bit what the Barcelona Harley Days were two years ago, you can watch this video.

Stay tuned, soon I will be announcing the new website for our Harley Tours in Spain, together with the dates and prices for the 2010 tours.

See you on the road !

We might be small….but we ain’t no bugs !!

SOT — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:36:03 +0000

Great video, found on FTWCO (via Chopperdaves). Check it out !!

Ride Safe.

See you on the roads !!

Thinking time.

SOT — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:58:31 +0000

From now on I will spend more time thinking than riding, since the moment to plan for Spain On Twins‘ next year has arrived. It’s time to prepare the calendar, update the web (I might even prepare a Spanish version of it), decide on the roads to take for next year’s tours, and plan the events I want to attend and the friends I want to visit.

Probably I will prepare a shorter version (7-9 days) of the routes, to make it easier for foreign riders to come to Spain and be back home in a couple of weeks. That move will also make the tours cheaper (it seems the crisis is starting to fade out, but saving a little money still seems to be a smart move…), and by doing so we hope you will avoid some “home arguments”, too…

Initially my plan is to organize tours on June (Twist&Twins, a route on the Pyrenees that next year will run from San Sebastian to Barcelona), September (History&Twins, a route around the center of Spain with Start/Finish at Madrid) and October (Sun&Twins, a route around Andalucia, on the South of Spain, with Star/Finish at Malaga), and try to attend the II European Posse Ride on July. The original plan is to try to recruit as much Spanish riders as possible, and prepare a tour to the start of the EPR (Prague) and back home from the finish (Rome). The I EPR was great, but I hope this time I’ll not be the only Spaniard in the pack !! I will probably attend the Euro Festival at Saint-Tropetz next year, and as much rallies as I can.

Since Google has decided to ignore us (suddenly, they have moved our web from the top 3 position on all Google pages, to page 3 or even 4 depending where you are), I will focus my communication efforts on Facebook (you can add me as a friend or become a fan of Spain On Twins’ page) and twitter (follow Spain On Twins on Twitter). Fortunatley we are still Nº1 on Yahoo.com and Bing.com if you look under Harley Tours in Spain.

I am now negotiating with the hotels and restaurants, and the plan is to have the web updated and running by the end of January, so you all have the time to think about wich tour to book, and plan in advance.

Depending on time availability I’m even thinking in organizing the Spanish 500 miles (copying the original 500 miles of Belgium and the Swish 500 Miles), but I can’t promise anything so far. It would be a great thing to do, businesswise and personally. Let’s see if I can find the time and resources to organize it.

I’ll keep yo’ll updated

Take Care.

See you on the road !!

Winter has come

SOT — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:57:20 +0000

and it seems that this time is here to stay with us for a while….

This weekend has been a really stormy and windy weekend, with temperatures abruptly dropping down and even with the first centimeters of snow covering the mountain passes of the Pyrenees. It seems that the “comfortable” season is over, and the “tough” season starts now….because nothing will stop us from riding !!

It’s time for winter gear, gore-tex gloves and neophrene face masks, but the engine will keep running all year round.

It’s our duty. It’s our passion. And we live by it.

See you on the road !

Racing Sunday

SOT — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:39:42 +0000

Last Sunday we had a great excuse for a Sunday Ride. Close to our hometown (Zaragoza), there is a new racing circuit, and the World Series by Renault were to be held there. That was enough reason (together with a Sunny day, with more than 23ºC and no wind….) for a group of Harley Riders to join for a fine day on the races. We met at 9:30 at the usual meeting point, had a coffee, refilled our tanks, and off we went. 16 bikes in perfect formation hitting the road again. There were all kind of bikes, from Sporters to Ultras, Dynas, Fat Boys, V-Rods.. but we all adaptad to the usual 110 km/h pace and started to enjoy the ride. 80 kms after we left, the group felt the need for another coffee, so we all stopped again for it. There were no reason to ride fast, so we just enjoyed the moment and continue the interrupted conversations. 15 mins later we fired up the engines again and the group hit the road once again. More than 20 kms before arriving to the circuit, we could see the traffic jam, so we switched to single formation, and kept overtaking the cages. We received quite a few looks, some of them of admiration, but also some of envy, since this 2o kms took some of them almost 1 hour. We parked our bikes together at parking B, fixed a little problem on one of the bikes, and once solved, headed for the entrance, already feeling the excitement of the sounds from the engines and the crowds. The circuit is simply spectacular. A first class circuit designed by XXX with the help of Pedro Martinez de la Rosa. Simply amazing. A circuit that will put the region back in the racing map, once the urban circuit is definetively closed. It deserves a Moto GP or F1 race. For Sure.

We spent all mornign there, enjoying leg after leg. The group splitted, since some of them needed to be back home in time for lunch (remember, that’s 14:30 or 15:00 in Spain !!), but some of us stayed there untill everything finished. Then we hurried to the exit of the circuit before the massive traffic jam formed again, and looked for a place to have a nice (and late, even for Spain’s standards…) lunch. We enjoyed the nice food and the better company so much that we stayed at the restaurant longer than we’d have liked, because the night catch us up (last Sunday was the day when the hour was changed, so it got darker earlier…), but it was well worth.

I really enjoyed the day, and we’ll sure get together again soon for another Sunday Ride. I just wish weeks had more Sundays…

See you on the road !!

Bye, bye Buell !!

SOT — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:27:45 +0000

Eric Buell has made today a sad anouncement. Buell will stop producing the amazing Buell bikes. It is really sad news, since Buell bikes were one of a kind, really innovative and fun to ride, especially on our twisty roads in the Pyrenees.

Harley-Davidson, tough, has commited to provide parts and service the existing fleet of Buell bikes. A limited stock is still in the dealer’s. Go get one before they’re gone !!

Thanks for what you’ve done for bikers Eric.

See you on the road !

PS.- If you want to check Eric Buell’s statement, you can check it out here.