The Pan prefix on our bikes is from the Greek word for „all“ or „every,“ it reads today as all over Europe. Certainly did that this year. France, Switzerland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Austria, Frolicked among the pointy bits of the Alps on a bi-weekly base, Italy, Lichtenstein, and of course Germany.
It was time for another notch in the saddle last week and I headed for Croatia.
I had another week of having to get rid of overtime so I decided that one more last ride out for 2022 was in order.
But where. Somewhere warm, perhaps the Adriatic coast, this late in the year it could be a challenge, but thats ok, I do cold rides and I, rather optimistically, did pack my swimmies.
The weather report gave me a window from Monday to Friday with a forecast of heavy fog but only slight chance of rain or snow. Come Monday morning made myself a thermos flask of Tomato soup, chucked a few bangers and butties in the buttie box set off, as usual waaaay too late, joining the A8 I rode past Munich and fell out of the ass end of Germany into Austria at Bad Reichenhall, caught the A10 at Salzburg and shot through Austria like oat cakes thorough a puppy to hit Serbia just past Villach.
And boy did it start to get cold on the way to Villach. At first it was just a few flakes of snow, it wasn’t a lot, just enough to call it snowing. The little flecks of snow and ice soon became patches and patches became a landscape of white, with ice and snow piled up over half a meter on the side of the Autobahn, shoved off the road by the snowplows.
I carried on over the border and through the tunnel, emerging at the other end into south Europe, gone were the hard contrasts of white snow and ice, black and gray rock and the dark green of pine trees, the sun was going down and I was in a terra-cotta landscape, it was much warmer too. All kinds of browns and reds and yellows coming very strong in the early evening.
Somewhere somebody was roasting chestnuts over a wood fire and I inhaled the heady aroma of woodsmoke and watched as ghostly tendrils of rising mist blanketed the landscape and were beginning to soften the outlines of the mountains.
Moments like these are what riding is all about.
Daylight was now fading fast and the fog was getting thicker, it was time to stop riding and find a place for the night, this can get difficult in Slovenia as I know from past experience as you canner just roll into town, head for the town center and expect a hotel, there just arn´t any.
I left the Expressway to see what I can find.
I passed five or six villages before hitting a larger town with a hotel, I knew it was a hotel as it had a huge sign proclaiming: „Hotel!.“ A typical travelers hotel in the middle of nowhere, no bar, no restaurant, no vending machines and at 130 Euros a night, no chance.
In a huff I carried on receiving the impression that the villages were starting to get more and more Deliverance-y, it was getting darker, the roads were rougher and I hadn’t seen any living person in ages.
Half an hour later I was starting to get cold and hungry and the sun was way over the yardarm, I stopped at the next village and asked an elderly couple if they knew where a hotel was to be found. They pointed back the way I had come at some bright lights and assured me that they had rooms for rent.
I thanked them, turned around and headed for the lights, strange though, I did not see the couple after turning round, they had vanished, swallowed by the fog I guess.
Inside the place I found a girl behind the bar and three patrons, and the Deliverance-y feeling upped a notch, she was the kind of girl who looked like brain cells were in short supply and kept in a jar somewhere in the fridge and together with the patrons I would say the the family trees here resemble yuccas.
„Do you have rooms?“ I asked in my clearest northern English gentleman’s clipped British accent.
„Yass, vee hef Rhoom!“
„Good!“
She started to busy herself with bottles and glasses, „ok“ I thought, „she is serving the others first, I’m cool with that!“
She turned to me with a glass in her hand.
„Do yu vant ice wid Rhoom?“
I looked at her blankly.
„Whats that?“
„Rhoom, you vant Rhoom!“
„Yes to sleep“
Yu no vant Rhoom?“
„No I want a room“
„No Rhoom?“
I did the pantomime of cocking my head to one side while closing my eyes.
„Ahhhh! Yu vant Rhoom?“
„YES!“ Finally we were getting somewhere.
„No hef Rhoom!“
„Oh“ I thanked her and turned
„You no vant Rhoom?“
„Yes, I want a room“ I say, turning round hopefully.
She tries to hand me the glass.
„No“ I say; „I don’t want rum, I want a room“
„So you no vant Rhoom?“
„No, goodby“
She looked at me and at the glass in her hand in confusion
One of the drunk patrons made to stand up and slurring curses began to approach me in the staggering storks gait that habitual drunks have when they think that they are in full control of their facilities.
„Bring it on dickhead“ I thought, but one of the other patrons pulled him back and I left.
This would be comedy gold in other circumstances and if I were not too cold and hungry to appreciate the moment.
I remounted after sweeping the ice lenses of frozen fog from the seat and whistling „Dueling Banjoes“ I pulled out of the village into the night.
But I still had the problem of where to sleep.
It is said that that lord looks after fools and children, sometimes he looks after Slammer as well, I decided to carry on to Ljubljana, it was only another 30 kilometers and I would be sure to find something there, however, just around the corner in the next village I passed a neon sign with „Rhooms“ sorry Rooms. I turned and ten minutes later I had a warm room all to my self. No restaurant of course but across the road was a food truck selling Döner and Cevapcici. One each, and two beers, a hot shower a cozy bed and I was a happy biker sleeping like a log.
The next morning the fog was even thicker, it had left a glassy sheen of ice on the bike and the seat crunched as I sat down. I rode off but I could not see a thing, in time I saw a set of tail lights from a truck and snuck behind it, keeping a respectful distance of course, only to be flashed by a truck following me, I imagined I could feel the heat from his headlamps he was that close, probably annoyed as hell at this idiot biker in front, riding slow and keeping him from his important deadline.
A sheet of ice detached from the truck in front and I took it on the helmet where it shattered into a million pieces, but not before a sliver found its way between the rim of my helmet and my collar, melting all the long way down my back to the crack of my ass.
I rode like this for a whole while until very suddenly I was out of the wall and into brilliant sunshine, I had to blink a few times and after all that fog it was quite a shock to see green wooded hills with the occasional slab of rock and fairy tale villages dotted in the landscape below. Unseen to me the Expressway had been rising and I was out of the fog line, from now on it was downhill all the way to the Adriatic. But that brought another problem, after paying for an Austrian vignette and a Slowenien vignette I was already out of 20 Euros and did not want to cough up again for a Croatian vignette to boot. But I had an idea, I would ride to Piran at the north tip of Slovenia, or… or, carry on to Italy and Venice, hadn’t been there for a while.
Piran-Venice
Venice-Piran
There was a fork in the road ahead and soon I would have to decide which tine to take.
Left to Piran
Right to Venice
Left
Right
Right
Left
Venice
Piran
I was still juggling the direction when I hit the fork, Left-right…..
I was already over the solid white line.
Left
Right….
I hate executive indecision, I get it from time to time, I simply can’t make up my mind and I hate the way it blocks my thoughts. You simply can’t decide what to do, your mind goes into BSOD-mode. Executive indecision stops you from being clear and decisive and taking action, normally it is not much of a problem when I have time, but it becomes a problem when the dividing rails are close, getting closer and I was heading straight at them going at a fair lick.
The scientific name for this condition is „Aboulomania,“ another word that we mugged from the Greeks by the way.
The only good thing about it is that it helps to build tension in my tale.
So, where was I?
Left-right
Venice-Piran
I hit the winker, leaned to the right and headed to Venice.
First though I had to pass Trieste and the ports, the very same place where all these bloody lorries were heading, soon the lorries were head to tail and three abreast, annoyed with each other for blocking the way for a change. Clearly this was not a road for bikes and I left the Autostrada and headed to Venice via the back roads.
I wasn’t actually going direct to Venice as apart from the historic city the rest is cookie cutter town, dull grey and one building looks just like another. I was heading to Jesolo and down the landspit to Punta Sabbioni where the ferries leave for Venice and Murano and Lido. There are also a few hotels there, three star, cheap and cheerful, just the way I like them.
I found one that I liked, checked in for 60 Euros a night plus breakfast, had a shower and a nice long biker rated nap.
Later on, I had just finished a toilet seat sized pizza, I felt a rasp in my throat, kinda like being tickled by barbed wire, a hearty sneeze, a cough and a sniff.
Oh yes, we were going to do this. Right now and six hundred kilometers from home I had come down with a cold.
I took a half of red back to the room and huddled under the covers and switched the TV on. I actually have a TV at home and I have it connected the the Mac mini, great for Netflix and co. but I don’t actually watch TV in the usual way.
I flicked through the Italian TV stations and the horrors of Italian game shows, their only pulling point, as it were, seem to be the humongous tits of the presenters. Discovery, History, Nat Geo TV, showing. Hitler, Nazis, Nazis and Hitler and UFO´s and Aliens and Nazis and Aliens. Surely that topic must be exhausted by now.
Then on to the German TV stations, mind melting German talkshows, Ernest faced news programs and Germany is searching for the superstar. Seeing the this program has been searching for a few years and they haven’t found one yet, I would think that they are just being overly picky. However KIKA the children channel had finished the kiddy programming and were now showing „Bernd das Brot“ or Bernd the bread, who’s protagonist is a curmudgeoning sentient loaf of bread and it is the most intellectually stimulating program on contemporary German TV.
The next morning I was feeling totally grotty, but still wanted to take the ferry to Venice, I took a covid test that came up negative and an hour later I was again in Venice. Not for the first time, and it won’t be the last. Venice is simply to beautiful to visit only once.
I did however not need to visit the museums and I wasn’t up for a lot of walking so I just sat there and simply watched the boats and people go by.
Around five I again took the ferry back, ending this last visit.
The next morning, I paid up, saddled up and in driving rain headed for home, arriving eight hours later via the Brenner and apart from the last three hours at freezing temperatures it was a rather uneventful trip.
Now its Sunday and I am sneezing and snotting my way through yet another roll of kitchen wipes.
So that was the last rideout of 2022, at least for now.
It was time for another notch in the saddle last week and I headed for Croatia.
I had another week of having to get rid of overtime so I decided that one more last ride out for 2022 was in order.
But where. Somewhere warm, perhaps the Adriatic coast, this late in the year it could be a challenge, but thats ok, I do cold rides and I, rather optimistically, did pack my swimmies.
The weather report gave me a window from Monday to Friday with a forecast of heavy fog but only slight chance of rain or snow. Come Monday morning made myself a thermos flask of Tomato soup, chucked a few bangers and butties in the buttie box set off, as usual waaaay too late, joining the A8 I rode past Munich and fell out of the ass end of Germany into Austria at Bad Reichenhall, caught the A10 at Salzburg and shot through Austria like oat cakes thorough a puppy to hit Serbia just past Villach.
And boy did it start to get cold on the way to Villach. At first it was just a few flakes of snow, it wasn’t a lot, just enough to call it snowing. The little flecks of snow and ice soon became patches and patches became a landscape of white, with ice and snow piled up over half a meter on the side of the Autobahn, shoved off the road by the snowplows.
I carried on over the border and through the tunnel, emerging at the other end into south Europe, gone were the hard contrasts of white snow and ice, black and gray rock and the dark green of pine trees, the sun was going down and I was in a terra-cotta landscape, it was much warmer too. All kinds of browns and reds and yellows coming very strong in the early evening.
Somewhere somebody was roasting chestnuts over a wood fire and I inhaled the heady aroma of woodsmoke and watched as ghostly tendrils of rising mist blanketed the landscape and were beginning to soften the outlines of the mountains.
Moments like these are what riding is all about.
Daylight was now fading fast and the fog was getting thicker, it was time to stop riding and find a place for the night, this can get difficult in Slovenia as I know from past experience as you canner just roll into town, head for the town center and expect a hotel, there just arn´t any.
I left the Expressway to see what I can find.
I passed five or six villages before hitting a larger town with a hotel, I knew it was a hotel as it had a huge sign proclaiming: „Hotel!.“ A typical travelers hotel in the middle of nowhere, no bar, no restaurant, no vending machines and at 130 Euros a night, no chance.
In a huff I carried on receiving the impression that the villages were starting to get more and more Deliverance-y, it was getting darker, the roads were rougher and I hadn’t seen any living person in ages.
Half an hour later I was starting to get cold and hungry and the sun was way over the yardarm, I stopped at the next village and asked an elderly couple if they knew where a hotel was to be found. They pointed back the way I had come at some bright lights and assured me that they had rooms for rent.
I thanked them, turned around and headed for the lights, strange though, I did not see the couple after turning round, they had vanished, swallowed by the fog I guess.
Inside the place I found a girl behind the bar and three patrons, and the Deliverance-y feeling upped a notch, she was the kind of girl who looked like brain cells were in short supply and kept in a jar somewhere in the fridge and together with the patrons I would say the the family trees here resemble yuccas.
„Do you have rooms?“ I asked in my clearest northern English gentleman’s clipped British accent.
„Yass, vee hef Rhoom!“
„Good!“
She started to busy herself with bottles and glasses, „ok“ I thought, „she is serving the others first, I’m cool with that!“
She turned to me with a glass in her hand.
„Do yu vant ice wid Rhoom?“
I looked at her blankly.
„Whats that?“
„Rhoom, you vant Rhoom!“
„Yes to sleep“
Yu no vant Rhoom?“
„No I want a room“
„No Rhoom?“
I did the pantomime of cocking my head to one side while closing my eyes.
„Ahhhh! Yu vant Rhoom?“
„YES!“ Finally we were getting somewhere.
„No hef Rhoom!“
„Oh“ I thanked her and turned
„You no vant Rhoom?“
„Yes, I want a room“ I say, turning round hopefully.
She tries to hand me the glass.
„No“ I say; „I don’t want rum, I want a room“
„So you no vant Rhoom?“
„No, goodby“
She looked at me and at the glass in her hand in confusion
One of the drunk patrons made to stand up and slurring curses began to approach me in the staggering storks gait that habitual drunks have when they think that they are in full control of their facilities.
„Bring it on dickhead“ I thought, but one of the other patrons pulled him back and I left.
This would be comedy gold in other circumstances and if I were not too cold and hungry to appreciate the moment.
I remounted after sweeping the ice lenses of frozen fog from the seat and whistling „Dueling Banjoes“ I pulled out of the village into the night.
But I still had the problem of where to sleep.
It is said that that lord looks after fools and children, sometimes he looks after Slammer as well, I decided to carry on to Ljubljana, it was only another 30 kilometers and I would be sure to find something there, however, just around the corner in the next village I passed a neon sign with „Rhooms“ sorry Rooms. I turned and ten minutes later I had a warm room all to my self. No restaurant of course but across the road was a food truck selling Döner and Cevapcici. One each, and two beers, a hot shower a cozy bed and I was a happy biker sleeping like a log.
The next morning the fog was even thicker, it had left a glassy sheen of ice on the bike and the seat crunched as I sat down. I rode off but I could not see a thing, in time I saw a set of tail lights from a truck and snuck behind it, keeping a respectful distance of course, only to be flashed by a truck following me, I imagined I could feel the heat from his headlamps he was that close, probably annoyed as hell at this idiot biker in front, riding slow and keeping him from his important deadline.
A sheet of ice detached from the truck in front and I took it on the helmet where it shattered into a million pieces, but not before a sliver found its way between the rim of my helmet and my collar, melting all the long way down my back to the crack of my ass.
I rode like this for a whole while until very suddenly I was out of the wall and into brilliant sunshine, I had to blink a few times and after all that fog it was quite a shock to see green wooded hills with the occasional slab of rock and fairy tale villages dotted in the landscape below. Unseen to me the Expressway had been rising and I was out of the fog line, from now on it was downhill all the way to the Adriatic. But that brought another problem, after paying for an Austrian vignette and a Slowenien vignette I was already out of 20 Euros and did not want to cough up again for a Croatian vignette to boot. But I had an idea, I would ride to Piran at the north tip of Slovenia, or… or, carry on to Italy and Venice, hadn’t been there for a while.
Piran-Venice
Venice-Piran
There was a fork in the road ahead and soon I would have to decide which tine to take.
Left to Piran
Right to Venice
Left
Right
Right
Left
Venice
Piran
I was still juggling the direction when I hit the fork, Left-right…..
I was already over the solid white line.
Left
Right….
I hate executive indecision, I get it from time to time, I simply can’t make up my mind and I hate the way it blocks my thoughts. You simply can’t decide what to do, your mind goes into BSOD-mode. Executive indecision stops you from being clear and decisive and taking action, normally it is not much of a problem when I have time, but it becomes a problem when the dividing rails are close, getting closer and I was heading straight at them going at a fair lick.
The scientific name for this condition is „Aboulomania,“ another word that we mugged from the Greeks by the way.
The only good thing about it is that it helps to build tension in my tale.
So, where was I?
Left-right
Venice-Piran
I hit the winker, leaned to the right and headed to Venice.
First though I had to pass Trieste and the ports, the very same place where all these bloody lorries were heading, soon the lorries were head to tail and three abreast, annoyed with each other for blocking the way for a change. Clearly this was not a road for bikes and I left the Autostrada and headed to Venice via the back roads.
I wasn’t actually going direct to Venice as apart from the historic city the rest is cookie cutter town, dull grey and one building looks just like another. I was heading to Jesolo and down the landspit to Punta Sabbioni where the ferries leave for Venice and Murano and Lido. There are also a few hotels there, three star, cheap and cheerful, just the way I like them.
I found one that I liked, checked in for 60 Euros a night plus breakfast, had a shower and a nice long biker rated nap.
Later on, I had just finished a toilet seat sized pizza, I felt a rasp in my throat, kinda like being tickled by barbed wire, a hearty sneeze, a cough and a sniff.
Oh yes, we were going to do this. Right now and six hundred kilometers from home I had come down with a cold.
I took a half of red back to the room and huddled under the covers and switched the TV on. I actually have a TV at home and I have it connected the the Mac mini, great for Netflix and co. but I don’t actually watch TV in the usual way.
I flicked through the Italian TV stations and the horrors of Italian game shows, their only pulling point, as it were, seem to be the humongous tits of the presenters. Discovery, History, Nat Geo TV, showing. Hitler, Nazis, Nazis and Hitler and UFO´s and Aliens and Nazis and Aliens. Surely that topic must be exhausted by now.
Then on to the German TV stations, mind melting German talkshows, Ernest faced news programs and Germany is searching for the superstar. Seeing the this program has been searching for a few years and they haven’t found one yet, I would think that they are just being overly picky. However KIKA the children channel had finished the kiddy programming and were now showing „Bernd das Brot“ or Bernd the bread, who’s protagonist is a curmudgeoning sentient loaf of bread and it is the most intellectually stimulating program on contemporary German TV.
The next morning I was feeling totally grotty, but still wanted to take the ferry to Venice, I took a covid test that came up negative and an hour later I was again in Venice. Not for the first time, and it won’t be the last. Venice is simply to beautiful to visit only once.
I did however not need to visit the museums and I wasn’t up for a lot of walking so I just sat there and simply watched the boats and people go by.
Around five I again took the ferry back, ending this last visit.
The next morning, I paid up, saddled up and in driving rain headed for home, arriving eight hours later via the Brenner and apart from the last three hours at freezing temperatures it was a rather uneventful trip.
Now its Sunday and I am sneezing and snotting my way through yet another roll of kitchen wipes.
So that was the last rideout of 2022, at least for now.
