After having forgotten the time, spending two hours at the beach instead of 20 minutes I got back on the bike and set course for London.

Traffic was bad and we were slowly crawling up the hilly motorway, stopping countless times. As annoying as that was it made me understand something I had been wondering about for quite some time. The reason for filtering on a motorcycle. It’s probably not what you (or I) thought. What filtering really is all about is that you don’t have to stop. It’s not really about getting ahead. Being stuck in a traffic jam on a bike is very different from being stuck in a car. For one you can’t really drive with the clutch alone like with a car so you constantly have to rev (with your right hand) while squeezing the break leaver every other second while balancing the 150 kg motorcycle uphill. So you have all your muscles tensed up for as long as you are in the jam. This is annoying for 5 minutes let alone two hours. It gets exhausting fast. Especially when you have already been riding 800 miles in the past two days. So filtering is not all about speed but more about convenience or rather fatigue. The only problem is that with a bigger bike like mine with panniers you are not that narrow any more so it’s more difficult and often there just is no getting through.

It was getting dark and I was still stuck in traffic in Cornwall with a regular work day just hours away – in London.

While waiting – one driver had a megaphone out the window asking drivers to honk x amount of times for the correct answer number x to a question – I noticed that my bike was casting two shadows onto the car in front of me whose driver had just honked twice giving the correct answer to the question ‘Which is the capital of Norway?’. That’s when I realized what the yellow triangle warning light must have been about! My head light had to be out for me to see the shadows in front of me. After finally getting a chance to exit the motorway I checked the light at a petrol station that had already closed for the night and sure enough only the parking light was on. I didn’t have enough tools with me to get the bulb out or to check if it had just gotten loose so I adjusting the angle of the lights housing instead so I could switch on the high beam and would not blind anybody.

The tools on the F650GS are under the seat so it had to come off:

This high beam solution worked well and traffic was getting better at this late hour so I continued my journey safely and reached London at around 11pm.