Spoked
September 20, 2006 @ 10:43 AM
I think it was only two years ago that I realised the optimum way to merge my hobbies of frugality and not being at home was to acquire a push-bike, a tent and some panniers. The latest mission was meandering from Berlin to Lyon, rough camping and minimal expenditure being the only criteria, along with trying to avoid the madness that solitude can induce.
I couldn’t seem to get into the Czech Republic; someone had hidden all the border crossings, either that or my photo-copied auto-route map only showed massive pan-european highways. The fine points of planning have never been my forte. I had spent a couple of hours writing down the vaguest of directions from internet sites, which all seemed to make perfect sense, behind a computer, where Europe fits handily onto the little screen.
After looping around a town in a 10 mile circuit, I finally found the border, way after dark, showed the polis my passport, out of the same wallet I keep my cash in, cue whistle of cop........”Homies rolling flush over here yo....”(but in Czech obviously) AMATEUR.......I slid out of the checkpoint trying to look inconspicuous...not easy on a juggernaut of a bike in a village. Tried to buy a beer, and then realised that they don’t take Euros..... man, read something about where you’re going.
There I was though, in Czech, stoked, just find the well signposted route and off we go.....heh. Predictably, like the Euro, German efficiency doesn’t cross the border, one sign, and then it’s gone.....So I hauled off to some woods to camp and listened to deer barking all night. I seemed to have timed my visit to Bohemia at the same time as the national conference of pretty big hills is going on, no mountains, just every decent sized hill in the world has converged here for a pow-wow. It was amazing. Such a nightmare to haul yourself up those things, but sheer, howling fun bombing down them. A wee drop of caution is required though, as you have to thread the needle through all the potholes that the locals have been lovingly carving with their Ladas and Skodas over the years......I used to laugh at those cars when I was a kid......DON’T, these machines can take a hiding and come out smiling.The temperature regulation in Switzerland was a bit of an issue, what with the route being a sine wave with an amplitude problem. I could have melted the ice caps single-handedly doing these mountain passes, and conversely could have created new ones around my nipples whilst kamikaze-ing down the other side. The solution was simply just to wear only my black long-johns and nowt else, looking like a hairy ninja cat-burglar in his pyjamas.
So I cruised through all these ludicrous towns of gold, milk, watches and chocolate, my perverse outfit clashing horribly with those of the fashionista tourists who had sold their children into slavery just to be there. Getting to sleep in the alps was a tad difficult as the cows were all participating in a constant freejazz concert, their cow -bell rhythms sounding like a collaboration between Keith Moon and Art Blakey. Some of the poor sods basically had dustbins with bowling pins in them strapped to their necks, probably a reward for being the milkiest. I finally made it to Lyon, and to celebrate we took a burn to Paris for the star-studded affair that was the 20th anniversary of Etnies shoes. The Eiffel tower in the background, free booze spilling over the four bars for hours, a beautiful evening with old friends and new.I was in the van on the way back home feeling rather tickled about the extremely cheap night of cosmopolitan fun, when my long suffering friend, le stomach, began to murmur quiet displeasure about the rate of knots. His complaining soon turned into a rage, and he jumped up, taking me with him and ran to the window and screamed his orange sicky anger out into the night, and all over the van exterior. This would have been fine, if I didn’t have daftly expensive false teeth. (Which were catapulted from my mouth by the force of my yakking) It took a minute to register, and then nothing but a head grasp and a shrug could be mustered in response.
So much for my penny saving ways, I basically just spat 400 quid out onto the autoroute. Spoked indeed.
Glen Bolland is a skateboarder from Scotland.
