I needed to be in Cardiff earlier this week and with the current spell of scorching hot weather it made choosing a bike over the car a total no brainer.

My bike of choice for the 400 mile round trip was the Kawasaki Vulcan – and it was a real sense of looking forward to the ride that I set off at around 05:15 after a couple of early morning cups of coffee.

I did the first 30 or so miles on the motorway, more as a means to an end and then headed off for the next 160 or so miles on some wonderful A roads – which I think was mainly the A529 before at some point , I can’t recall where,picking up the A49 down towards Hereford and for the last leg to Cardiff.

The journey home was pretty much all A49 in steaming hot weather.  At the back-end of the previous week I had to re-schedule my trip to Spain and Portugal, and I wrote about that here.

Lunch on the way down was a very decent sausage sandwich and coffee at roadside stop on the A49 in a lay-by near  a place called Callow, which is about six or seven miles outside Hereford

The journey to Cardiff and back and the 30c heat provided me with an ideal opportunity to see how effective the ventilation was in the jacket I had bought a couple of months back – see this post, and also a shirt that I had bought (for daily riding) with the Spain/Portugal trip in mind.

The shirt is one of those light and breathable types (and that comes with a lifetime guarantee) and is fast drying after washing, wicks away sweat and apparently is ideal for multi day use. Its made by a company called Montane and I purchased t from Go Outdoors.

My expectation is that it will probably be the only riding shirt I wear for about 16 days in what is almost certain to be pretty hot weather conditions so if nothing else it will be interesting to see how it works in practice.

First impression are very favorable – with all the vents on the jacket open (arms, shoulders, back front etc) I stayed pretty comfortable and was only really warm when I stopped. The shirt seemed to be pretty good as well and certainly passed the ‘smell test’ when I got home, in fact there was no smell of sweat or body odour at all.

So all in all a cracking good day on the bike and I’m pretty optimistic that the jacket and shirt will do well when i set off in a few weeks on my re-scheduled trip.