There’s a certain decadent pleasure in going into a moderately posh restaurant and announcing to the staff that you’ld like a table for one, for dessert, please; if the front staff are young – as hotel front staff tend to be – they get this deer-in-the-headlights look, say “Yes, sir.” and then dash off to clear this with the maitre d’. The latter invariably reassures them that there is nothing wrong with this, and seats you.

Thing is, I’d had the beer, the oysters, the squid and chips and a couple of really rather nice wines, and I just felt I had to get chocolate in there somewhere, hence the change of venue…

I rode the Beemer down to Cornwall on Thursday afternoon, after a pleasant morning prepping the bike and doing manly things with compressors, grease and torx wrenches. I also refitted the GPS – now a doubly worthy addition to the bike, having discovered a Garmin version of the community-created PocketGPSWorld Safety-Camera map. I did 240 miles from home to Falmouth and was pleased to confirm for myself that there were safety cameras at every one of the fixed locations cited on the map.

It’s good to get advanced warning of other motorists who are about to hammer their brakes, and a great improvement to overall road safety.

I arrived in the spotty rain of the late evening, found a hotel, and had whitebait, followed by local scallops and seasonal veg, at a pleasant High Street bistro.

As mentioned previously, I was in Falmouth to visit Inspired Cycle Engineering to try out their recumbent tricycles:

Come friday morning I basically rode up to the Tregoniggie Industrial Estate and found their office in one of those small units that looks like an oversized shed, smelling of machine shop, rubber and grease, with homemade jigs and power-tools covering the walls – and I poked my head around the door, asking for Neil.

I’d swapped e-mail with Neil a couple of times, the general thrust being that I should come and try out their “Trice Explorer” trike and see what I think of it. Neil wheeled out the demo bike – different by their addition of a couple of chain-tensioning sprockets under the main boom, to compensate for the different leg-lengths of demo riders – and I was treated to a history of the company, a review of the models for sale, a complete adjust the demo bike to fit the customer session, and a briefing on riding and how they differ from standard bicycles. As a biker (rather than a cyclist) I was a slightly ahead of the game regarding the need to lean-in to sharp corners to stop the wheels from lifting, and to use mirrors and so forth.

So I tried it out.

To cut to the chase: these machines are fun! BIG FUN! It’s like being a kid again, except now your pedal Go-Kart can really go 40+MPH downhill, takes luggage and has hydraulic disc brakes. You can take your hands off the bars and the steering self-centres so that you can just sit-back and pedal on a straight, check a map, take a drink, or fiddle with your iPod. You can chuck it into corners that would terrify a pedal-cyclist, and on loose surfaces the back wheel does break-away like on a dirtbike. Although they are undriven, left- and right-wheel braking are independent so you can guess what kind of fun is possible there – although the geometry of the bike does try to do the “right thing” and be even-handed about application of just one or the other brake.

Oh, and there’s a parking brake. If you get fed-up going uphill, you knock it into low-gear to prepare for when you choose to move-off, and twist a knob which applies a V-brake to the rear wheel. So very, very cool. Apparently it’s not designed for doing handbrake-turns, but theoretically…

I did some orbits of the car-park, noticing Neil examining the Beemer somewhat intently before nipping back into the shop; he emerged with their “Trice XL” and suggested that I try it, saying that people tend to love either one, or the other.

He was right to get me to try the alternative.

The difference is in the centre of gravity, which on the XL is some inches lower by virtue of a gentle U-bend in the main axle; this pushed my weight closer to the centre of the bike, with the result that the XL felt untiltable. There’s a slight reduction in turning-circle – but not by too much, perhaps a foot or so – but the enhanced stability is worth it.

I orbited the industrial estate again, and came back to a bevy of bike-makers once again poring over the Beemer. Intrigued, I asked if anything was wrong only to find they were intrigued by some of the BMW engineering and extra bolt-ons. Chris seemed particularly taken with the tubeless spoked wheels – that you can remove and replace spokes without deflating the tyre – and with the rear suspension castings and the subframe. I demoed the AirHawk seats, RAM Mounts and the expandable panniers, and I am pretty certain that the first two were big hits. There was a certain amount of hmm, we’ll need to put our prices up a bit, we need one of these, and then we had a cup of tea and I had a look round the workshop, including the pipe-bending machine, the carbon-fibre vacuum-former and oven, and the manufacturing section.

I then went on a 3-or 4-ish mile testride on the open road; drivers give you a wide berth because they don’t know what you are, and you might scratch their paintwork. I get cut-up more on my Suzuki that I did on the Trice. One guy insisted on overtaking me although I was indicating for a right-turn, but frankly that happens to me on my mountain bike too, and at least he overtook me properly. Uphill is a bit slow – but I am rusty – while downhill was great, great fun.

I returned the bike, worked through an extensive options checklist with Neil, and will put in an XL order next week. Lead times are about 5 months at the moment, when the bikes are made to specification, so I’m looking at late Feburary-ish. I’ll post the options list once it’s finished, so my cycle-mad colleagues can nitpick.

This is a long posting already, so I’ll continue it in Part 2, including the restaurant story…