Christmas is coming so the weekends are crazy busy meaning the usual 48 hours off from the world is kinda spoken for and time for getting out on the bike is becoming scarce. But weekday rides are ok right?! Luckily for me, it looks like a couple of other riders in the group were also keen to get out as while I was typing 'is anyone free for a ride this Friday...' into WhatsApp Matt posted the exact same message! Much smaller group this time, Matt on his new Husqvarna and Ronnie on his KTM were the only riders available so we set a plan to meet around 6.30/7 at Elimbah and hit the trails.

I've done a couple of rides up at the Glasshouse Mountains and some trails are becoming familiar. But today was going to be all new as Ronnie had covered a different area on a ride with another group the previous week. The first section was very sandy, something I'm still getting used to and then it was off into single trails. The good thing was there was very little tarmac and this was the usual single track, sandy, muddy, whipping-through-the-trees riding that I love the Glasshouse Mountains for.

Then things got a little tougher... Ronnie had warned us that the next section was probably the toughest bit and he wasn't wrong: a steep descent down a hill track covered in ruts with loads of loose gravel... Not a lot of traction and slippery as all hell! I managed to get down most of it but had to walk the bike down a section as I was terrified of stacking the bike. Despite my slow pace, I did manage to slip the front wheel bring the back around to wallop me on the legs and down the DRZ went... Not too bad, easy enough to get back up, limp down the last bit and then catch up with the fellas back on the trails.

After that, the next couple of sections were all fantastic culminating in the excellent 'Rattlesnake Track', so called due to it's twisty nature. This was something else and probably some of the best riding I've experienced. It's not fast, but it's definitely fast paced! It's all enclosed single track with either sand, mud or pine needles. There are loads of twists through the trees (thank you Barkbusters for saving my knuckles on more than one occasion!), whoops, corners - we were flying along and loving every second.

Having done a bit of research into the track, it turns out that it might actually be intended to be for mountain bikes?! Can't quite imagine doing it under pedal power, far better on a dirt bike.

Once we were out of that track it was a short hop up to the big red car park for a breather and then off again to try out another new (to me) trail. Which is when I came unstuck for the second time of the day, again on a steep descent... I don't know what it is, getting up hills isn't a problem but going down them is becoming my nemesis, especially if there's rutts. The hill in question wasn't actually too bad, and maybe if I'd just gone for it I would've made it no problems - but as it stood, I slightly panicked, tried to walk the bike down a particularly steep bit of slippery as rock and yup, the front wheel slipped and down the bike went.

This one was tricky as the bike was on an incline - if I picked it up, it'd just run away and I wouldn't be able to stop it, meaning a bigger (and potentially damaging crash below). So I waited for the fellas to double back and luckily Matt came to my rescue. Between the two of us, we managed to get the bike upright and limp it down the hill with the engine off, using the clutch as a brake. Thinking about it, that was my mistake and why I ended up with a downed bike. If I'd used the clutch/brake technique I probably would have made it down by myself?!​

On we went and by this time, things were heating up... We were getting onto 10.30ish which doesn't sound early but when you've got up at 5am, rode for 45 minutes up the highway and then done 3 and half hours zipping around single tracks it begins to take its toll... But we were all keen as mustard and off we went again, this time hitting a single track known to us as 'The clergyman's Track' after it was shown to Matt and Luke on another ride by a couple of dirt biking clergymen! I only recognised it halfway through as we were doing it in reverse, the giveaway being a fallen tree that was tricky to get around last time but was a breeze in reverse.

At the end of that one, we were pretty beat but again our enthusiasm got the better of us and we headed to one more track which I call the 'Burnt out car track' (can you guess why?!). We'd done this on a previous ride when it was heavily overgrown and it's got a few challenges, mainly getting over and under fallen trees but there wasn't anything too tricky.

We were doing fine but decided to stop after a tree hop and have a breather which is when it all went to shit for me...

Setting off again, Matt and Ronnie headed off and I swung myself onto the bike putting my right foot down... into thin air and then sand which then led to completely over balancing and down the went the bike for the third time this ride! Now I initially laughed this off seeing the funny side in overballencing but that laughter soon turned to a little bit of panic when I discovered I couldn't get the bike upright. A combination of ending up in a bush leaving me with very little room to maneuver and the fact every time I attempted to pick up the bike it slipped forward in the sand left me puffing and panting and to be honest, beginning to freak out... I just didn't have the physical strength to pick the damn thing up!

Now what I should've done is calm down, not panic and think the situation through. We were on a single track with one way in and out. The fellas knew that I'd be on that track and would figure out I was somewhere between them and where we stopped so it was only a matter of time before they came back and helped me out...

Then I spotted Ronnie through the trees, he'd come back to check on me - only to not notice me in the bush, turn back around and speed off! No! I was totally stuck. I tried calling Matt but there was no coverage on the phone which only added to my mental stress.

I quickly realised there was no way I was getting the bike up so wasting what strength I had left was pointless and would only lead to me either hurting myself or guzzling even more of my dwindling water supply. And off course they came back - Matt, my saviour for the seconds time this ride appeared through the trees, helped me get the bike up and off we went again. Really, it wasn't a problem, I should've just sat in the shade and waited... but panic does funny things to your brain.

Looking back, I think the main problem was I'd pushed myself harder than I can handle. By 10.30/11ish I was done. The early start, the heat and the constant concentration of riding the technical single tracks had left me feeling far more fatigued than I'd realised. In addition, I'd pretty much drunk the 2.5 litres of water in my camelbak as well as the backup bottle I carry on the bike leaving me not only thirsty but with nothing to hydrate with.

To be honest, the whole thing left me pretty shaken. Since I started riding offroad I've always had an awareness that a potentially bad accident could easily happen at any time and it seemed ridiculous that a life threatening situation could have resulted from me overbalancing on a stationary bike!

So lesson learnt: carry more water, say when you're done (there's no shame in it!) and if you have a down, sit tight, wait for the cavalry and try not to panic!

I took the rest of the ride ridiculously easy. The other fellas steamed off but I took it very slow and steady back to the car park. After saying our goodbyes, I headed to the Big Fish servo, aired up the tires, fueled up and drank a couple of litres of water - I was that dehydrated that my leg muscles were cramping!

Streaming down the highway back to Brisbane I mulled over the ride. There had been some amazing times, the 'Rattlesnake Track' being the absolute highlight - tracks like that are the reason I was so desperate to get into dirt biking! But I will be practicing picking up the bike in the garden, trying to get more physically fit to build my stamina and definitely trying to figure out how to store a bigger backup water bottle on the bike.

Check out the ride on Relive - you'll notice the 'Rattlesnake Track' at the 17 second mark ;)

I've only done a handful of rides up at the Glass House Mountains but it's quickly becoming my favourite playground for the bike. It suits my riding style as there's plenty of mud, water, sand and single tracks to blast through. It's also only about a 40 minute blast up the highway from me meaning it's completely doable on the DRZ400 without having to trailer the bike.

There were eight riders out today, Luke on his WR250, Matt on his new Husqvarna 510 (which turns out to be the best bike in world!) along with Ronnie and a new face Scott on their KTM's. We also planned to meet Ian on his WR400 and Steph on her KTM out in the forest. Jeff on the Honda CRF400 was going to 'find us' on the trails...

So how the hell was Jeff going to find us?! Well the plan was to run the Life360 app on our phones. I've never used it before but you create circles of friends in the app and it plots your location on to a map... Lets see how that goes!

After spending 10 minutes sheltering from the rain at the Big Fish Tavern we decided to ride out in the drizzle and get into the forest. It was clear from the start that today was going to be pretty epic as after a couple of minutes riding down a sandy track we hooked a left and hit the 1st single track.

And it was amazing! Winding through a twisty track, trying to keep on the pegs to stop the front wheel washing out in the wet sand, hopping over logs, ducking to avoid low hanging branches - so much fun.

The day carried on with more of the same, mainly whipping through single tracks with the occasional blast along a dirt road to get to the next turn off. Amazingly, Jeff did find us! We'd just started on another track when he appeared, my phone had led him right too us.

We met with Ian and Steph at around 9.30 and headed off again, this time down a pretty steep muddy decent in search of a track they'd hit a couple of weeks ago. No joy finding the track, but getting up and down the slick muddy slopes was good fun.

There were a couple of spills, pretty much everyone dropped their bike at some point and we had to get the tools out on one section to fix Stephs throttle which was sticking. The only real disaster was that Luke realised he'd lost his tool bag along the way... We did double back in an attempt to find it but it was a little like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Amazingly though, he got it back! Steph put a post in a Facebook group she's part of asking people to look out for it and someone found it and returned it to Luke the next day - bit of luck that.

As always, the ride was captured on the excellent Relive app running on my phone.

But sadly, apart from the group shot I didn't get any other photos - I was to busy enjoying the ride! So I managed to get a couple of shots of the bike before she got a bath, just to prove how much she was caked in mud!

In terms of 'must do mods' on the DRZ400, the list goes:

1. case savers
2. bash plate
3. barkbusters

and purely for aesthetics:

4. tail tidy

Having done the first three items when I picked up the bike a year ago I've been putting off doing the tail tidy as there always seemed to be something else to spend money on. But having put up with everyone I ride with telling me I 'really have to do something about the arse end of the bike...' for a long time I decided to get to it and replace it.

The first challenge was finding a suitable unit. The ones offered by B&B and R&G appear top notch in terms of quality but pretty expensive for what they are. Asking around on Facebook quickly revealed that the Savage tail tidies listed on eBay for around $40 are more that up to the task at a fraction of the price. nice.

So I ordered one up from eBay along with an A4 piece of 4.5mm polycarbonate. One of the fellas who'd chimed in on the Facebook post had suggested making a backing plate for the licence plate as in his words 'it stops the number plate becoming a meat slicer' and also reduces the risk of the number plate cracking (which seems to be a common problem when the bike gets dropped).

While I was waiting for the unit to turn up in the post I got to designing the backing plate template and figuring out all the other bits I'd need to make the project run smoothly. One thing that came up in my research was that the police are pretty hot on roadworthy dual sport motorcycles having a reflector on the back of the bike:

All motorcycles must have at least 1 rear-facing red reflector which is visible from either side of the rear of the motorcycle.

https://www.tmr.qld.gov.au/Safety/Vehicle-standards-and-modifications/Vehicle-standards/Motorcycle-standards#reflector

if they pull you over cos they're in a bad mood, sure as eggs are eggs you'll pick up a fine. Interestingly, when I took the tail tidy into the local police station the cop on the desk said he wouldn't pull me up on it! But then I found out that traffic cops are a different department to bobbies in squad cars and decided that it wasn't worth taking the risk... The good news is that the factory fender ships with great bolt on reflector so my template incorporated the original to keep everything nice and legal.

And to doubly make sure the cops would be happy I also picked up these round screw in reflectors that I'd use in place of bolts - safety first and all that.

The template can be downloaded here: QLD Motorcycle Number Plate Template PDF. Please note: it seems that each state has a slightly different set of dimensions!

Which left the last challenge being how to wire in the back brake. I had no joy finding a 3 wire connector that matched the one on the bike and after a lot of asking around the general consensus was to cut the current wires close to the current brake light and then splice/solder the wire to the ones on the new unit. After some hunting around I found these excellent 'solder splice heatshrink tubes' at JayCar. What a genius idea: the middle of the heatshrink tube has a small band of solder so all you do is slide the tubing onto one of the wires, merge the wire strands as you normally would when joining wires with solder, slide the tubing back over both wires aligning the solder section with the middle of the joined wires and heat with a butane or electric coil lighter (or a heat gun if you have one, long and short being 'heat' not 'flame' as you don't want to burn anything). The heat melts the solder giving a great join quality and meanwhile the shrinktube contracts around the wire giving a waterproof seal. Wrap in electrical tape and it's good to go.

Once the unit arrived the first thing I discovered is that the slots don't line up with the holes on an Australian number plate - which isn't a big deal but if i was going to fix the plate to my polycarbonate backing plate I was going to have to perform some surgery. After a few experiments I decided to cut the ends off either side of the tail tidy and drill new holes in the plate to mount it.

I checked with the legality of this and found that:

Drilling holes in a number plate is only permitted:

• to enable it to be attached to a vehicle
• if the holes do not interfere with the appearance of any characters on the plate
• if plates are not altered in any way so as to damage or deface the plate.

https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/registration/numberplate/replace-change

The next challenge was figuring out which wires joined to which. The wire colours on the new unit don't match so it was a case of trial and error to figure it out: twist the wires together, turn the bike on, pull the brake lever and check to see if the light gets brighter - it turned out the combination was:

• grey to red
• black to black
• white to green

With the wires joined, the number plate and reflector fixed onto the backing plate and the indicators added it was a simple case of removing the old unit and bolting the new one in place using the original screws. The cables were routed around the subframe, the fender went back on and it was job done.

All in, it was probably $65 including bolts etc from Bunnings - we'll worth it as I think you'll agree, it looks far better than the original! 

Only a short ride, 3 hours in the forest up at Mnt Mee with Wayne, Ronnie, Chris and Guy but that was perfect for me as to be honest, I kinda felt like I was starting over... They reckon it takes a couple of weeks to 'forget' how to ride and a couple of hours to get back into the rhythm.

So I went for it! It was a little shaky at first and as it was very dry and dusty I took it slow and steady and had a great time.

Highlights of the day we're spotting a huge snake (well, huge to me - apparently it was a baby!) and making it up 'A Break' in one go without hitting the deck.

All in all a perfect blip in the forest - it's good to be back ;)

As ever, I had the excellent Relive app running on the phone which captured the entire route - if you've not tried it, it's GPS tracking app that compiles any media you shot along the way into a video. Well worth a go!

Today was no exception! Apart from smashing through some great puddles and getting more confident on sand the highlight of the day was 'The Clergyman's Track'. I've no idea how Matt found his way back here, I'm guessing he had it plugged into the GPS but after winding through the forest we found ourselves at a fairly innocent looking right turn into the bush...

Which is where the fun and games began. This tiny winding track was excellent: at some points it was just wide enough to get the bike through, then you were winding through trees, then puddles, then getting around fallen trees... All slow work but so much fun.

And the reason for the track name? Well Matt and Luke bumped into a couple of riders some weeks back who showed them the track and they turned out to be ministers!

The other thing I've stated to use is the excellent Relive app on my phone. Set the app recording at the beginning of the ride and it'll follow your every move. Take some snaps along the way or shoot some video and when you're done, click finish and it'll build you a video along with the media you shot along the way and the stats of your ride (speed, elevation etc).

Pretty impressive stuff! It even allows you to export the data to a KLM file so you can load it into a GPS device or Google Maps and you can also explore the root on Google Earth via the website. Well worth checking out.