Hi! My name is Tomas J., mostly known as Tom. I was born in Lithuania where I lived till 2008 summer. Moved to the UK purely out of curiosity, and never really looked back.

My Passion

My passion for motorcycles started when I was fairly young, but I started more seriously tinkering with them only since I relocated myself to the UK, also I was more interested in the mechanical side of it more than actually riding them. I loved restoring all sorts of abandoned projects and crash damaged motorcycles as a hobby, till one year…after restoring a crashed Honda CBR 600, I fell in love with it and I finally have decided to get my license done, and that was in my late 20’s.

Start of the Adventure – BMW R1150GS

Funny enough, not long after I found myself riding more and more on small back roads that are not quite suitable for sports bikes, rather than on motorways, and I realised that sports bikes are not quite suitable for what i want or need.

Started looking into tourer/dual sport type of bikes and one day i just drove all the way from Cambridgeshire to Edinburgh to pick up used BMW r1150gs (more about my gs here) , and i think that’s when all my adventure riding started.

On top of that, I got inspired by Long way Round and Long way Down and I started looking into Trail riding as well as Longer trips around the UK and Europe.

My Background – My Failures

Having no enduro or any trail riding experience, i was a bit clueless but also curious about it, also had no one to ask where to start or how to ride off road, i just baldly jumped on my bike and went exploring using common sense. I have learned as I went and learned quickly about legal routes, where to find information about them, navigation, and what is needed.. Obviously mistakes were made on the way but more importantly i have learned from them a lot too – mainly to keep my chin up when things don’t go as planned, accept that when you go down, it is not a failure –  it’s  just part of the adventure!

Bikes Choices

With time, as trails got more serious, i realised that my GS is not as good of the choice as i thought, even if it was a good comfortable bike and the fact that it never really fell flat on its side was a massive bonus, however the weight of it, and few more bits about it, was just something i couldn’t live with. 

Yamaha XT660Z Tenere

Soon after, I picked up a Yamaha Xt660z Tenere (more about XT660Z here) – as a project, and after tidying it up, it seemed like a much better choice for Adventure riding than GS. Done a few miles on it, travelled all around the UK, went to Europe a few times too. Good bike, a lot lighter than GS, reliable, however – more and more trails i have done on it, more and more i got convinced that in order to have more fun i need a lighter bike. Xt660z weights a lot less than GS obviously, but the downside of it –  it’s top heavy and when it falls, it falls… and that brought me back to my drawing board – looking for the next perfect Adventure bike!

Future!

What’s it going to be? What i’m planning to do in the future? i’m not sure yet, what I’m sure of, is that my bucket list is getting longer and longer and that some exciting times are coming! That’s for sure! 

23.08.2023 and I think ill give a quick update, uneddited, raw…. after a while i got a bit sick off all this, and decided to make some changes, was hoping for something better but it turned out for the worse… obviausly i kept XT for a little while, but also AJP PR7 was something that came into the family and that was a really good bike… i did break a bit more ofthen then i was expecting it to, and i think that really contributed to my personal bad moods if you like… anyway, AJP was a really good bike, and another trip on it doing TET Wales, then Tetty trail (part of the TET), and few major break down decided to get rid of it.. problem was that XT was already gone as i thought that AJP “could do it all”, boy I was wrong about it… Sold my lovely XT, AJP prooved to be unreliable… and after a major brekadow that took me a good 6 months to fix (mainly because of lack of will…), i decided that it was time for a change… a big change! (more about AJP here)

So yeah, got my head straight, fixed AJP PR7 and sold it, just to get a bunch of KTM’s! yeah… secretly i was admiring KTM’s, and not just randondom KTM’s but 990’s! And… i managed to get not 1 but a whole 2 of them, one 2008 model, and one 2011, both in OK condition… 2011 one was the one that needed a bit of attention, but that was ok, as usual – i didnt mind another project bike 🙂

Problem was that so much loved 990’s turned out to be not what i was hoped for…. Dont get me wrong on this one, 990’s are lovely bikes – they are! Especially 2011! … but the economy of them… erm – well its rubbish! power – too much! and makes fun not fun anymore! … hard to explain, but lets just say when things are too easy, they become borning!

After a long think, and a even longer rethink, decided that i need something simple…. yeah, pretty much my old XT! I even contacted the new XT’s old owner, asking if he would like to sell it back to me! (yeah he wanted to!) but getting my old xt would have been no fun at all – plus, i sold it for a reason in the first place, so…. i had to find something beter than my old XT, not as powerfull as KTM990 and at the same time (hopefuly) something a bit more economical!

And so.. DRZ400 project was born! 🙂

more on that with time… lately writing blogs, while fixing bikes became a bit of the burden….just had to cut down on time spent on bikes, and writing…

Well! -that sums it up for now! 🙂