CHAPTER 44
SLEEP OVER
1978 – 1986
My memory is very vague on the date of this story.
All I know for sure is that it was summer time and it was one of the very rare extra hot days that we get every now and again.
I can only narrow the date down to an eight or nine-year period 1978 – 1986, I know it’s a massive time span, but that is as close as I can get it.
The only way I could work out the time period was to remember what bikes I was riding during these dates.
I’m not 100% sure of the actual dates of each bike and I always owned more than one bike at a time and some of the bikes mentioned overlapped each other, but, saying all that, up until 1978 I was riding my Yamaha RD 350 and after 1986 I was riding my Kawasaki Z 1000.
In-between these dates, I was riding my Honda CB 550f1 and my 750f1 Rickman/Honda, like I mentioned earlier, I may have been using my RD and my CB 550 in the same time period and the same goes for the Rickman and the Z 1000.
The only thing I know for sure that it was not the long hot summer of 1976 because I was either riding my RD250 or my RD350.
Taking into consideration that my memory as failed on getting an accurate year for this story, I still remember most of what happened on this particular night.
( Photo 1 ) . An Ariel view of Cowbridge town sitting in the fertile land of the vale of Glamorgan and on the left-hand side of the town, the A48 by-pass, snaking it's way passed the town, the photo was taken in 2018, the town is a lot larger now then it was in the 80s with the increase of a number of housing estates on the outskirts of the town.
The Story.
It was a Saturday night, on this Saturday my friends and I all spent the day down Southerndown beach, while we were there we wandered around and spent some time inspecting the ruins of Dunraven castle, taking special interest in the old ice house in the castle grounds and on the beach itself passing the time by throwing washed up seaweed which we found on the beach and dropping rock pool crabs on the girls while they were sunbathing.
It was a very hot day, and not a cloud in the bright blue sky.
Because day’s like this one were so very rare, we always took advantage of the good weather and rode around to different places enjoying the holiday atmosphere that always came with sunshine in Wales.
Even if it was a holiday or not, the sunshine always brought that kind of relaxed and happy feeling out in people.
We rode around, riding in the warm air, enjoying every second of it.
The weather was so unusual that it always gave us a holiday feeling, there is no place on earth more beautiful than Wales in the sunshine.
Later in the evening, we all piled into the local pub in Southerndown ( The Three Golden Cups ), for a couple of pints to cool down, normally we would have ridden up to The Plough in Monknash, but while we were down by the coast in Southerndown we went local.
While we were there, we decided to go for a run, they call them ( ride outs ) nowa days.
We headed out onto the A48 to go to Cowbridge town to a chippy that was on the main road in Cowbridge town, which was a few miles away down in the Vale of Glamorgan.
There were closer chip shops in Bridgend town.
To name a few, the Windsor in Queen street, Gino's on Cowbridge road and of course one of the most popular, the Ranch on Nolton street.
Going into Bridgend town was to short of a run in this weather and we had been there a million times in the past, so Cowbridge was chosen because the run down the A48 was on a nice long wide open road and a bit of speed was good to blow the cobwebs away and keep cool.
There were eight to ten bikes in all and ten to fifteen riders including the pillions.
These included :-
Myself = Phil frog.
Gaenor.
Wobble.
Fat mike.
Galen.
Brian.
I’m not 100% that the ones I listed above were there, I do know Gaenor and me were there for sure, also Wobble and Fat Mike.
The remaining people, I’m even less sure about, but I know for sure there a few of us there that night, it is a little alarming how your memories fade as you get older
Anyway like I said earlier some of the details are a bit on the vague side, well all this did happen around forty years ago.
So we arrived in Cowbridge town, we parked up behind the old town hall and had a wander around eating our chips out of a bag wrapped up in old newspapers.
We slowly walked around enjoying the atmosphere.
It was almost like being on holiday.
It was getting late in the evening and someone suggested that we take a ride to Cardiff to finish the night off.
The night was still warm, it had been so hot in the day the pavements still radiated the heat from the days' sunshine.
( Photo 2 ) . The Three Golden Cups, Southerndown, photo taken in 2018.
The people of Cowbridge were walking around in summer shorts and brightly coloured t-shirts, the cheap type of T-shirts with images of palm trees and sunsets that were brought back from a holiday trip to Spain.
We were the exception of course carrying a leather jacket, Helmet and gloves, which were always necessary when riding a bike, only a fool would ride around without leathers and a helmet.
When riding a bike no matter what the weather was like, once you have fallen off a few times you will realise, there is no option but to wear all this kind of kit for protection reasons, the gear was something you needed to wear for your own personnel safety, youngsters and stupid people only wore T-shirts and flip-flops, which many inexperienced bikers did on warm days.
Our summer artier under the leather jackets would have been a t-shirt instead of some other winter garment like a thick jumper or a body warmer, I wish we had hoodies back then, they would have made life a lot easier and most likely kept you warmer.
In some cold winters, I have taken a rubber hot water bottle on the bike with me, when I went to work in the morning.
The rubber bottle was tucked down inside my jacket, it kept me warm for a short time.
Some bikers in the winter, so I have been told wear woman’s tights to keep warm.
Just for the record, I have never worn any ( honest ). It would be a little embarrassing to try and explain why you were wearing tights, if you had an accident.
I can imagine a lot of snickering going on as the Paramedics lift you up into the ambulance and start cutting your clothes off you to get at the broken bits, and then they come across the tights.
Not worth the risk in my opinion.
( Photo 3 ) . The Cowbridge by-pass looking east towards Cardiff, where you see the first street-lamp on the left side, is where the triangle of uncut grass was located, the triangle section was used for our bed for a night.
So we made our way out of Cowbridge ( Bont Faen ) in welsh, which loosely translated means ( Stone Bridge ).
Where the cow bit in the name comes from I have no idea.
Well, anyway we were back on the A48 and heading west towards Cardiff City.
We made our way to the road that would take us on the A48 and then crossed under the bypass itself and headed east again, whoever was the lead bike went in the wrong direction, so we needed to double back out of one of the many green lanes that radiate out from Cowbridge.
We had just entered the bypass that skirts right around Cowbridge.
We didn’t get very far, for some reason, we all pulled into a lay-by or hard shoulder whatever it was called on the bypass.
One of the riders must have had a reason to pull over, but the, why, escapes me now, time as blurred another memory.
If you don’t know the bypass that I’m talking about, I’ll describe it to you.
The bypass is basically a bridge over and around the town of Cowbridge.
It comprises of two lanes in each direction with a central steel crash barrier running down the center of the road.
The bypass follows the contours of the surrounding landscape and there is a nice sweeping bend and a slight incline at each end of the bypass.
See photo 1.
One bike pulled over, so we all followed him and pulled over and parked up on the thin narrow triangle shaped lay-by.
It was late in the evening, but the air was still humid.
The weather had been very hot and there had not been any clouds in the sky.
The sun shone bright and hot all day, sun up to sun down.
It had been this hot all day, the sun baked everything it’s rays touched, it had been like this for a few days.
Great riding weather.
Love mini heat waves.
I could still feel my petrol tank was still warm from the suns rays and the sun had gone to bed for a quite a while.
Everyone dismounted their bikes, some sat on the steel crash barrier at the side of the road, others had taken their helmets off and lite up a fag.
We all stood or sat around chatting for a while, then some of the guys climbed over the steel barrier and sat in the long grass in a small triangle shaped area that separated the bypass from the hedges of a farmers field.
The grass was tall and bone dry from the long days of hot sunshine and with no rain the grass had turned brown in colour.
The air felt cooler here on the side of the road.
So after a little while everyone climbed over and sat or lay down in the long grass.
There was no or very little or traffic on the road.
An occasional car or taxi would pass by, otherwise there was total silence, except for the chatter we made or the occasional screeching of a night owl.
There were no houses nearby, we were surrounded by countryside, strangely being so close to a main road this little ignored and overgrown triangle was very peaceful.
I can almost say serene.
We had the orange glow of Cowbridge town on our right side and complete darkness with just fields to our left and a clear sky full of stars above us.
( Photo 4 ) . Cowbridge town, on a busy day, it is a very old town which as not changed for century’s, too posh for me.
After a little while, the talking started to quieten down as people relaxed and then all sound stopped and before everyone knew it we were all fast asleep.
We slept the night away undisturbed by anything in the world, we were all in a deep sleep for the rest of the night.
In the morning we were all still in a deep sleep when a large articulated ( semi ) lorry drove passed and woke everyone up out of their dreams, it was not the sound of the lorry driving past, but by the driver blasting his horn has he rumbled passed for what seemed like the length of the bypass.
I supposed that could be termed as a rude awakening.
A few people started to sit upright out of the long grass which was now damp with the morning dew.
Everyone was still in the same place that they had laid down to sleep a few hours earlier.
While people were waking up, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, I noticed on the other side of the crash barrier, parked behind the bikes there was a blue mini car with a Union Jack flag painted on top of its roof.
Everyone inside the triangle area was waking up and standing up and stretching after sleeping on the rough ground and being rudely woken up by the passing evil lorry diver.
In the front seats of the mini were a young looking boy and girl, maybe in their late teens or very early twenties.
They were wearing trendy clothes of the 80s, the type you would wear to a nightclub back then, ( the nightclubs had strict dress codes for some reason ).
They must have arrived in the early hours when everyone was fast asleep, and they too had fallen asleep in the car after they parked up.
The boy who was in the driving seat had his head leaning right back on the head rest with his mouth wide open and the girl had her head resting on the boys shoulder, and they were still fast asleep, the lorry had not disturbed their slumber.
Fat Mike got up to his feet, lite a fag up and walked over to the steel barrier and leaned over and stared into the window of the mini.
Mike then leaned over a little further and slapped the roof of the mini with the flat of his hand making a loud bang that would have woken the dead.
The occupants of the mini woke up with a start and looked very confused for a moment.
The boy looked over to where we were in the triangle and I could see panic as well as confusion cross his face as he witnessed a number of bikers sitting in the grass and more rising up out of the long undergrowth.
Mike looked into the window again and the boy was now confronted with a large, long haired hairy biker staring at him though his car window, Mike was no more than a foot away from his car and filled his window, not really something you want to wake up to in the morning at the side of the road.
The boy was in a real panic, the car did not start up fast enough for him, he kept looking at the keys and fumbling around with them and then looking up at Mike who was still staring at him through the window, he did this in quick secession, become more panicked with every nod of his head.
The car roared into life, he crunched the car into gear and drove off as fast as the car could carry him, he didn’t look in his mirrors when he pulled off and his still half awake passenger was more confused than he was, and he was in such a rush he didn’t wait to put his seat belt on or use his indicators, he was in a rush to go for some reason.
It must have been a bit of a shock for him being rudely awakened and seeing a number of bikers rising up out of the long grass in the early morning light.
We never got any further than that lay-by, and we never finished the night off going to Cardiff.
We sleep`d under the stars on a bed of grass with the cool night air as our blanket making that triangle one of the best places to be in, on a hot summer evening.
In a short time everyone had woken up, we all remounted our bikes and headed off down the bypass in a group towards Cardiff and then turned around by the garage which is located by that old greasy spoon café that used to be there, just passed the garage, ( which was not open at the time, or we would have had breakfast in there, it was too early in the morning ).
We crossed over the road bridge and then back down onto the bypass once more heading west towards Bridgend.
On the ride back, our group of bikers would grow smaller has single or pairs of bikes would peel off with a wave and a beep of their horn heading to their respective homes and have a nice soft bed without any annoying lorry drivers disturbing their sleep.
Not a lot happened that night, but how often do you get a good night sleep under the stars at the side of the road, once in a lifetime experience, I would think.
( Photo 5 ) . At lest half the people in this photo were there on the by-pass on that hot night, this photo was taken on one of the many BBQ’s party’s at Nash Point in the early 80s, that’s me wearing the green shirt being molested by everyone .
Back row, from left to right:- ? not sure of the first one?, Richie Jones, Beaker, Wobble, Brian, John Pig.
Middle row :- Simon, ?not sure?, Cherry, Bridgeman with his arms between myself and Cherry’s legs, me, Phil Frog, Fat Mike, Lawson with his finger up his nose again.
Front row :- Julie, Trem, Gaenor.