Table of contents

• Report elephant meeting 2014 Elephants are pigs
• Exhausting nights
• The machines dig in the dirt
• EleFacts

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Crosser to plowshares: The driveway to the upper part of the site had its pitfalls – for both drivers and spectators.

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Trunk on the team, …

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… Trunk on the grill: There are quite a few individual solutions for transport (barrel sidecar) or catering (suckling pig) here.

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Custom rollator as “AOK chopper” with one-in-four system: …

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Thomas, the baker from Munich, steps on the gas with the little walker.

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Heinkel tourist team on a delicate mission in the mud.

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Was there in 2011 with the Honda C90 from England, again in 2014. And in the meantime Ed March drove it from Malaysia to Great Britain (Facebook: C90 Adventures).

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sunbathing.

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The elephant meeting is the oldest and largest winter meeting in the world.

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Onset of summer at the winter meeting: By Saturday at the latest, the last remnants of snow in the boiler had burned up.

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Winter tires.

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Sports & scene

Events

Report elephant meeting 2014

Report elephant meeting 2014
Elephants are pigs

From a biological point of view, of course, this heading is nonsense. But if you look at the pictures like that, you can see the real core.

Michael Schumann

02/24/2014

The mud in the upper crossbar to the left of the snack bar at the entrance is more than ankle-deep by Saturday lunchtime.
The first elephant riders had already arrived on Tuesday, boarded the steeply sloping meeting area with their mostly not very fresh bikes and trailers, laid out the best places with straw and set up the tents on them. The snack bar at the entrance has been open since Wednesday evening: cakes, Viennese sausages and of course beer. Without it, not much is possible at the elephant meeting.

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Exhausting nights

But with pretty much everything: Steve and his buddies have been there since Thursday. They have their Hondas for around 100 kilometers from Cham in the Upper Palatinate to the hamlet of Loh high up in the southwestern foothills of the Bavarian Forest,
Ducatis or KTMs left in the garage. Instead, they traveled to Kreidler in the old fashioned way. “Bella Rossa is my name!” Announces Steve loudly and points to the red foil that stands next to the tent, with two blue garbage bags, not quite stylish, but packed with dirt. “We’re going home again today,” he says a little more quietly and grins and lifts his Fanta can. “So that we can regenerate at home on Sunday. Because the last few nights have been exhausting. On Friday morning at five o’clock the stewards took the ignition key from me. Too loud, they said. “A Kreidler Florett! There must have been something other than Fanta before.

Juraj from Slovakia has his tent a little further down. His Heritage Softail team is parked in front of it. Unlike many, Juraj is not there with his second or winter motorcycle. By the time it entered the site, the Harley was apparently still sparkling clean
been. Now dried mud flats spoil the blue and white metallic paint. But Juraj doesn’t care. “I’ve heard so much about the meeting, I finally had to see it,” he grins. How he wants to come up the steep, muddy path with the team again? “Oh, that works somehow. The neighbors help. ”He points to three Czechs from a Jawa club. They are there in proper style with 1960s two-stroke engines. They brought a suckling pig with them in one of their original socialist moped trailers with a wheelbarrow wheel. It now hangs half-eaten over the embers in front of the tent. The elephant doesn’t live on beer alone.

The machines dig in the dirt

At the top of the sloping crossbar, a BMW F 800 GS driver is footing centimeters towards the exit. The two-cylinder stomps and steams, the road tires are completely covered with mud. The rear of the high enduro culls with a twitch. “You can see that performance alone is not everything,” comments one of those standing by. In the end, two others take heart and help the poor guy, whose soup is already running out of his helmet liner from the exertion. Push it to get you out of trouble.

Ra-Broooot! A few motocrosser and enduro drivers demonstrate what is still possible with the right tires in this slump. Without helmets, but in Bundeswehr overalls and with a big grin on their faces, they do their laps. The lumps of dirt are thrown meters high into the air made by the smoke from the campfire. The mud flippers clap back into the dirt. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you have lost. If your reflexes allow it, all you need to do is turn away quickly and hold your hand protectively over the beer mug. Johan, the Dutchman, leaves dirt racing completely cold. He prefers to sit around the fire with his buddies. Because it’s warm and sunny on Saturday, he wears the thick fur coat open over his bare chest.

Johan has been coming to the elephant meeting regularly for years. And for years the Ratbiker have always camped in the same place just below the entrance. Johan’s CB 750 Four team looks more daring every time. The inside of the oil pan is likely to be the cleanest part. But it goes: “The 800 kilometers to here and back home in one day, why not?” Says Johan with a shrug.

“Klacks” would certainly have liked this positive attitude. A photo of the founder of the meeting, who died in 1998, hangs in the organizers’ organization office. “Because of such originals” – like Johan the Dutchman – “it is worth coming here alone”, says their spokesman Michael Lenzen. Or also because of Thomas from Munich. The 66-year-old plows through the area with his “AOK chopper”. A children’s quad motor drives the wheels of the rollator, which are reinforced with snow chains. Two green cable ties tame Thomas ’white beard, his blue eyes sparkle:“ I am a baker by trade. If bakers had built the ‘Titanic’, you would still be swimming today, ”he says, accelerates and rolls on. No, elephants are really not pigs. You are just a little bit crazy. And they’re having a lot of fun.

EleFacts

Schumann

The elephant meeting is the oldest and largest winter meeting in the world.

Organizer: Federal Association of Motorcyclists V. (with 120 volunteers on site)

First date: January 1956 near Stuttgart, according to a classified ad in MOTORRAD, organized by Ernst “Klacks” Leverkus

Surname: comes from the Zundapp KS 601 team “Green Elephant” (first meeting)

Number of participants: According to various regional daily newspapers in 2014 in the Bavarian Forest 5600

Temperatures at the meeting: maximum plus 12 degrees (Saturday noon, source: wetteronline.de), minimum minus 5 degrees (Friday night, participant measurement)

Terrain: Property of the Stock Car Club Solla e. V.

Old elephant meeting: Competitive event at the Nurburgring, alteselefantentreffen.de

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