New cafeteria/ motorcycle meeting place Cafe Lättis was opened few years ago. It has become very popular and if the weather is nice there can easily be 100 or even 200 bikes on sunday afternoon.
Last august we had the first ever XR-meeting there and we had even 12 or 13 BMW S1000XR bikes in the same time!
8th of August 2021
This cafeteria has homepage in facebook. They are quite active there and sharing new pictures and updates very often! This summer when I’m riding with my enduro the distance to to visit Lättis is quite long. But if you just make the route it can be made easily. This time the route was excellent!
Best ride so far this summer
The route from Veikkola Nest to Cafe Lättis was like 150 kilometers. I found trails that I did’nt ride before and especially the trail that starts from Suopellontie (Karkkila) was excellent!
In the map the route looked like this!
On the west side of Cafe Lättis there is one landowner who doesn’t want bikes or cars to ride through!
So you need to ride to the paved road of Rautakoskentie! It seemed there was al lot interesting trails on the west side of Lättis so gotta go exploring there again!
Springtime was so short! It started in the end of April and soon in May you will start to feel like it’s summer already. And I had so many ideas about new possible routes for transeurotrail. First idea was to make additional route Helsinki – Turku. There was already one but it was going from Turku to the TET route and to connect to it in Räyskälä (almost 100km away from Helsinki). So I started to check my plans in the beginning of May.
Here I’m riding the few possible selections Between Karjaa & Perniö and also all the way to Teijo ironworks area. I made second checking ride a week later and I was checking the possible routes between Salo and Lieto. I found only private yards and tracks that were impossible to ride.
The new update for the TET route was made on 13th of May! On that same day I was riding again! For that ride I found interesting start From Karjalohja: A very small ridgeroad going between two lakes (Kannaksentie) -but there are quite many summercottages on the way, I’m not going there again.
The part in the end of this video comes to Ruonankorventie that I have recommended to quite many riders that they should check this. I was riding from Lohiojanie to Lemmulantie and then to Ruonankorventie. On May 15th I was inviting riders to make a group-ride to Iso-valkee and 15 bikes came to make a very nice ride together!! You can see some pictures here! I made also a video:
Then in the end of May (Helatorstai/ Ascension Day) I made a ride to check some small roads and tracks on Hanko Peninsula. Found some very good ones! Here’s the video:
Finally after a winter with HUGE amount of snow it was possible to start riding! And I did it with 4 times riding in one week. The weather was already quite warm -not like I needed to put all possible clothes on me. First day ride was less than 100km like this:
First ride of the season
Second day I was checking one place where was flooding.
Ride to Kärkelä Ironworks area
Here is the short video of the place where the river was flooding! I made a riding video of this next days ride.
3rd day short ride
Riding to the border of Varsinais-SuomiSnow was mostly gone but lakes had still ice!The temperature was something like 10-13 degrees -so not too cold anymore!
And then on saturday I got three friends with me and we did already almost 200km!
I did this already 2 months ago but finally I edited the video how I’m making the BIG impovement to my bike… Changing the rear shock from the original Continental Air Damper to Touratech “normal shock”. I hope this can help you if you’re planning this change!
Eicma 2021 was in November but there was not too many interesting bikes. Now when we are already in 2022 it is interesting anyway to look the newcomers for this year.
1. Aprilila Tuareg 660 This bike is coming straight to the same category than Yamaha T700 so it will not be easy to find buyers… Or is it? The adventure segment is growing fast, more and more new bikers starting their adventures every day/ week!
80hp – 70Nm – 187kg – Seat height 86cm – 18 L tank
2. MV Agusta Lucky Explorer 9.5 This one is not coming to the stores yet in 2022. But it proves that all manufactures really are interested about this adventure segment. Maybe even more interesting is the little brother Lucky Explorer 5.5
125hp – 85Nm – 220kg – 85cm seat height – 20 L tank
3. Honda NT1100 It’s quite long time since Honda had an affordable big touring bike. This new NT 1100 will be filling the missing gap. It has the same engine than 1100 Africa Twin but after that pretty much everything is different.
100hp – 104Nm – 238kg – 82cm Seat height – 20,4 L tank
5. Harley Davidson Pan America 1250 This bike is been in stores allready for awhile and there is a lot of test riding videos of this bike! But it is so BIG newcomer and remarkable new model to the market. Everybody’s even saying that it is not bad at all! It is actually very good!! Harley Davidson has now an Adventure Bike!
150hp – 127Nm – 240kg – 79cm Seat height – 21,2 L tank
Took a short testride today. Even I knew this is going to be great bike I was still surprised! What an amazing bike! The engine is marvellous! It gives smooth power already from 2000rpm and it sounds very nice too.
Already OffRoading…
The suspension is totally with manual adjustments but it seems it made me very happy with the factory defaults (I’m 120kg’s!) And that is rare. I was also very happy with the riding position even when I was standing. Maybe I would add 2cm’s to the height of the handlebar if I would be the owner of the bike.
The bike doesn’t look very special… Except the spoked wheels are very nice!
This bike would be big enough for me and for my wife. The power is ofcourse much smaller than in XR but I think I could manage with it. I did find ONE thing I didn’t like! When you’re filling the tank the lid of the tank doesn’t stay up! So when you take the gaspump you have to lift the lid up with your other hand to get the gas to the tank… Not very big thing but it made me think how easy it would be to change this! One interesting thing was the rpm meter in the TFT-screen! There was 2 of them!!! One on the left side and then another on the right side of the TFT… It seems they had (too much) space in the TFT screen to put it there twice 😉
We don’t have a lockdown in Finland. We are allowed to go out but meetings with more than 10 people is not ok. There was only 4 of us in a beautiful sunny weather and almost +10 degrees celsius. This time I didn’t choose any difficult tracks… and I finally made a video of this interesting route:
Old railroad track
This was a narrow railroad in Finland and it stopped working in 1967. But the track has stayed and it’s kind of in use as a road. But for example now in spring it can be tricky if there is still snow (and there was!!) Unluckily my riding ended with the flat front tyre in Karkkila (65 km’s from home).
I was lucky that there was one big bike (KTM 1090 Adventure) so I could take a ride with him back home and then I picked my bike with my big car…
This season I started later than in a long long time! But there’s quite obvious reason: Covid-19. Last week there was already quite nice days but finally when I made the decision to go out on sunday it was quite cold! +3 (celsius) was the highest and -1 was the lowest. But at least we had sunshine!
Somewhere in VantaaI had to fill the tank!With me was one KTM 1050 Adventure and yamaha XT660 TenereMy XChallenge is running nicely!
Triumph brought totally new models with 1200 twin engine. It has nice 90 hp -which doesn’t sound much but in this kind of bike it’s more than enough.
rrem
Even I didn’t have real knubble tires I felt the calling! “Go to the gravel! Go to the forest!” -It was shouting… And I did.
This is bike is definitely at home when riding in gravel!
It’s totally the best bike that I have ever been riding in the gravelroad! It is too heavy to take Off-Road but I don’t really miss that anymore. The seat should be softer and it should have better design. I could feel my ass wouldn’t like this after 200km’s!
This time it was very interesting! There was so many new models it felt like there’s no time enough to get to know all of them. Luckily I’m not a big fan of sportbikes… So few bikes wasn’t so interesting to me.
1. KTM 790 Adventure Maybe the biggest group of interested viewers was around this bike. It’s no wonder. The bike looks very good! It has hew parallel twin engine that KTM introduced last year. The engine has little bit less power than in 790 Duke but of course the torque is better is all rpm’s. Bike has almost all possible electronics: traction control, cornering abs, offroad abs, ridemodes and so on. It has 20 litres tank that gives the bike easily more than 400 km’s range on the road. Tank is placed around the engine so the center of gravity is very low. Price for this bike is 18500€ in Finland!
Tank around engineIt was difficult to take pictures of this bike! There was so much people all around it all the time.
2. Yamaha 700 Tenere Another adventurebike but totally different kind of idea! This is simple, not too much electronics and it looks more ready for an OffRoad ride! It’s almost 6000€ cheaper than KTM! The final price is still open but they said it will not be more than 12800€! 200mm travel is not much but they’ve tested this bike quite long time so I guess they think it’s enough. 16 liters tank gives this bike more than 300 km’s range.
It should’ve been white-red bike in the show!But this look very good! It calls me to make an offroad ride right now!
3. BMW R1250GS And here is another adventurebike but yet again totally different kind of thinking. This is legend of all touring/ adventurebikes but now it has bigger engine, more power and torque and it’s again more expensive. It has simply everything you can ever imagine the bike could have… -Ok, no reverse gear or automatic gearbox but anyway. The price for adventure version is more than 31000€ in Finland
Big bike to make long rides and tours
4. Suzuki Katana Suzuki makes a nice return to interesting and “modern” bikes. But the funny thing is that the design is very retro when it is based on 80’s Katana. The engine they take from GSX-S1000F so it delivers very nice power and easy riding. And the way it looks it will always give strong feelings to all pure motorcyclists!
Katana
5. Triumph 1200 SpeedTwin Triumph presents new line with 1200 Twin engine. The bike still looks totally retro but the engine is now more like modern and sporty. It delivers 96 hp with 112Nm torque in 4950rpm. Compare this with T100 engine: 64hp and 80Nm in 3800rpm -you can say that there is a big difference.
Go - Za 