Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
blue skies. Boats cruised or swung idly from moorings here and there. Such luxury and opu-
lence made that glittering patch of Mediterranean as different from the Midwest as a soybean
silo from a motor yacht.
John had grown more macho in the few weeks I'd known him. He felt supported in this en-
deavor by his accomplishments, logging many miles and having sexual relations many times
with an older woman. He'd proven his grit, and so he insisted that real riders sleep on their
motorcycles—it was commonly known and practiced. What? You didn't know that?
I tried, propping my head on my backpack and crossing my ankles over the handlebars.
A center stand would have been easier, but I wedged a sweatshirt under the left side, butt
and back, to shim things up to level, kind of. At dusk a guy came around hawking sardine
sandwiches for sixteen hundred fifty liras, about a buck, which seemed steep, but he had us.
Chopped sardines, onions and olives in olive oil on a hard bun, its fulgent taste perfectly blen-
ded the elements of that long, forever day and life on the Med.
Nobody could sleep, but John felt it best that we stay awake anyway. They couldn't pass in-
to Italy without seeing us, but they might see us and pass anyway. So we lay back and watched,
wondering if they would see us and pass anyway.
By midnight we slept. In the morning we agreed that they wouldn't have driven in the
night. If they had, they would have seen us and stopped because, after all, Jane couldn't hate
John's guts enough to put him in a fix just for slipping her the salami and not telling her he was
nineteen. Could she? Nah! We didn't think so. In fact, she might by then have reconsidered . .
.
Well, that didn't matter. The sun climbed higher and the day got hot, and with youthful
impatience, we wondered how they'd beaten us to the border. It didn't seem possible, but then
they had a big head start, and a four-wheeler goes farther between rest stops and covers more
miles in a day. Hell, you can practically nod off driving a four-wheeler and still cover a few
hundred miles a day. Because a motorcycle wears you down. The wind and sun take your en-
ergy, and so do the rain and cold. A car has a windshield and a roof—and a heater and wind-
shield wipers and three hundred miles on an average day, maybe four hundred. On a motor-
cycle you have thrills and chills, leaning and scraping and road fatigue in two hundred miles
or two fifty. Or three on a push. We'd pushed.
We knew they'd beat us by mid-morning. We waited till noon to come up with a plan on
impulse. Approaching the border on the Monaco side two German guys rode two up on a
little one-lung scooter. Like Hans 'n Franz, the driver looked muscularly miniscule, while the
guy on back bulged big. They too no speaka too gooda de English, but they pulled over as re-
quested to hear our story and maybe comprehend our proposal. Our charades conveyed our
need—they got it. John wanted them to pass through the border station as they had planned.
But instead of riding on back of Hans' little scooter, Franz would drive the Thunderbird. Franz
could do this, because the world was a simpler, better place at that time.
