Shovel Ride - Europe

stolen from Duckman's Bitchin' Biker Page

A 1974 Shovelhead was my fist Harley and I traveled a lot around Europe with this bike.

The trip to the most northern point of Europe was my fist trip on a Harley at all. I just bought a '74 Shovel in spring 1994 and late summer the same year Sandra and myself started toward North. Sandra on her Honda XL 125 (not recommended) and myself on my Shovel.
	The bikes are packed: A 1977 Honda XL 125ccm & a 1974 Shovelhead FLH custom. Just before the trip I machined a set of triple trees for my shovel to rake the front end 5 degrees. This trip shall be the testing of the fatigue strength of my own designed trees!
We took the train through Germany to Hamburg, rode from there to Hirtshals in Danmark to take the ferry to Kristiansand in Norway. First Norwegian land......

The first view days in Norway it was perfectly nice weather. We even found a lake with sandy beaches!
The closer to the arctic circle we got the colder it was and the strong icy wind cut into our faces.

	There was quite a bit of rain on the trip and big waterfalls steamed down into the see.
When we arrived the Lofoten the weather cleared up a little bit but it was still quite cold.	It was a Saturday afternoon about 100 miles from the place where the ferry leaves for the Nor cap island, when I realized that my clutch started to misfunction. After a while it was not possible to shift anymore. We stopped at a gas station and I opened the right cover of the transmission to see what was wrong. The bearing of the clutch push rod was gone! It was impossible to find anything or anyone to fix this bearing, but the woman at the gas station told us that there is a Harley Club at the Nor Cap island and that they will have a meeting exactly this weekend.
This sounded promising and we rode the last 100 miles to the ferry port. It was the same Saturday, August 13th, my birthday by the way, when we rolled our bikes the first time to the Nor Cap island. First we where looking for that Harley Club but people told us this club does not exist anymore....! What?? ... but there is an American Car Club and they have a Car meeting today, the stranger continued. So we where looking for this people and found them.
	The rest was routine: opening the transmission, weld the oil ring to the pushrod and add a view copper washers instead of the roller bearing. That's it! This will hold for the rest of the trip....and it did last till we got home about 4'000km later.
We had a couple nice days in Sweden on the way back south (except the night after we had pizza and an got sick). Because there was no place on the train in Hamburg we rode through Germany back home in one day: 1'100km!
Traveling information:	Bikes: 1974 Shovel, 1977 Honda XL 125 3 weeks (August 1st to August 21st) 7'500 kilometers (4'700 miles) States: Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden