May 1, 2020 - Beginner Biker Adventures

Wales Motorcycle Ride, Powys — Welcome to Wales, Powys

This is a route I rode in May 2019, back then I could not have imagined what is happening now one year on. I find myself now looking back at the freedom we had to ride where ever we liked. Enjoy my reminiscing and stick this route on your to-do list for when lockdown restrictions are eased.

This route offers a short loop taking in some of the best roads Wales can offer, beginning and finishing in Newtown (because I was staying with family in Welshpool, the next town north, and using this as my base). All in its about 130 miles and about 3.5 – 4 hours of riding time, factor in a couple of coffee and food stops and you have a chilled out day on the bike.

With not a lot of riding occurring at the moment, I thought I’d give you a glimpse behind the scenes here, to peek at the kind of computer kit I use to run this blog and produce my videos. It may not be the best video editing rig you can buy, but it will hopefully give you an insight into something that can produce good results without breaking the bank. Be warned, this gets a bit geeky!

MacBook Pro

I have a preference for Macs, simply because they’re generally well-designed, last well and have good migration and recovery features. I’m currently running a Mid-2014 15″ MacBook Pro Retina, with 16GB RAM, 250GB SSD drive and 2.2Ghz Intel Quad-Core i7 processor. Now before you cry ‘But boy they’re super expensive!’, I picked MacBook up refurbished from Music Magpie in November 2019 for £650 (but did have to buy a power supply at £80 on top). At the time of writing a similar spec brand, a new Windows laptop will set you back over a grand.

I’d recommend the Retina display, as its high resolution is perfect for inspecting video in a small preview pane. But note, RAM is not upgradeable on recent Retina Macs, so do get one with 16GB already in it. I also went for the fast Intel Core i7 chip, to help blitz through video rendering and processing. Overall, it’s plenty fast enough to work on a long 1080p video, and possibly 4k video at a push.