Jarkko Lehmus Diary

4500 Miles Of Folklore

It's been about four weeks since my last entry. I came back home on Tuesday and have been trying to figure out how to put all the experiences of the past three weeks into words ever since. It's a little past midnight on Saturday night. I've spent the day by going out for a little ride to sort out a few bits and bobs, done my shopping and been to the cinema by myself and now I'm sitting here looking for the right combination of letters to make sense of all the things I've experienced, thought and felt during my summer holiday. When the inevitable happens and the words fail me, or you fail to understand the words that I'm failing to produce, just look at the pictures and enjoy!

My summer holiday plans were very sketchy until the very last moment. To be fair I was a bit distracted by what was going on at work and I'd gone around Europe a few times before, so I thought I had the hang of it and BBC was throwing spanners in the works by trying to convince me that it was raining all the time everywhere I wanted to go to. All I knew was that I was going to jump on the bike and head south. I had my ferry tickets booked, but nothing else was set in stone until I mentioned to Erik, our Italian principal geezer, about possibly heading to the north of Italy and he in turn started praising his old stomping ground around Lake Garda and said that I could use a flat of his in the Stelvio National Park on the Dolomites. Could I refuse?

The end of the line, but the beginning of the journey. ©

The day before I left I popped over to Knockhill track to kill off the old tyres, put some new rubber on on Saturday morning, went home to pick up my kit and headed for the hills. A short blast to Rosyth, a ferry hop to Zeebrugge and a little stretch of the legs later I was settling into a hotel in Grenoble. Now, France is generally shut on Sundays, so finding anything to eat or do around midnight on Sunday night is a pretty tall order, so after the consumption of a few beers and a kebab had taken place I happily retired to my hotel, turned on the telly for a little channel surfing. After flicking through the channels a couple of times I settled on something I liked and soon after fell asleep while watching good quality porn on a terrestrial channel. I was truly abroad.

I confess to being suckered into being dubious about the French. I've been to Paris a couple of times and they all seem arrogant and aloof with a whiff of superiority complex and xenophobia, but at the same time I've met and worked with some frenchies that have stuff going on, if you get my drift. SO, when I woke up, I didn't really know what to expect. I don't speak the lingo, I've and I've got an English accent that sounds authentic enough to the untrained ear, so after dragging my sorry bones out of the bed I kept schtum, ate the feeble offerings the hotel called breakfast and headed south again. I've seen photos and I've heard legends of glorious roads, but nothing could have prepared me to what I was faced with: the kind of amazingly perfect weather I didn't know even existed, scenery that gives you a crick in the neck and a lockjaw, sweeping roads that literally take your breath away and a traffic culture that's relaxed, yet organised and very accommodating to bikers. I could swear I was in heaven even before I even had sampled proper French cuisine or being flirted at within an inch of my life.

Just another monday in Grenoble. ©

I know France, like any country, has got its failings, but for me it comes down to weighing pros and cons against each other. Scotland is amazingly beautiful country with great biking roads and hard drinking culture allied to a strange political situation, dodgy food, rubbish weather and not the prettiest of inhabitants. I know France has its shortcomings on all sorts of fields, but I really wouldn't mind living on the Med. Any suggestions for a job?

A dusk in Nice. ©

I fetched a good Finnish friend of mine from Genova and after we got him off the fatally ill Ducati and onto some healthy machinery he shared my feelings about the South of France.

Unluckily for us my friend had a couple of incidents, a broken mirror and a puncture, on his rental bike that restricted our movements on our chosen area, but I still think that we both saw just enough. All I can say is that my next ex-wife works as a dance teacher and lives in Entrevaux.

Getting it on in Entrevaux. ©

Unfortunately the time was taking no hostages and we had to move on. I warped my front brake disc in beautiful Cremona in Italy and lost most of my braking power, so we limped the last leg reaching Verona fairly late. I had one of those Lonely Planet books with me suggesting all manner of things, but nothing seemed to be accurate. I was standing on Piazza Erbe while my friend Arto was running around trying to find a cheap enough hotel. After a while, that was apparently quite a while, he returned totally pissed off. I had been happy just to watch the birds fly by in the meantime. Verona was looking very good to me at theat particular moment in time. After a couple of more hours and some acts of kindness by the locals we found our way into a lovely b&b close enough to the centre. Alcohol and women were sorely needed by this point... A taxi took us for a ride and droppe us off in the front of one of the dodgiest looking clubs ever in a shady suburb of Verona...

Our company thanks the Romanian educational system.

The next couple of days saw a detour to pick up a friend, Dwight, from Trieste and a trip to tourist-infested and stinkingly beautiful Venice before the return to Verona.
How could we fight the lure of the city of the star-cross'd lovers? English, Finnish, Italian and Spanish was spoken and new friends made. After lapping Lake Garda it was time to say goodbye to Arto who was heading back to Finland and brush up on the Vulgar Latin derived languages in as vulgar way as we could get away with. Our approach to life, an the argument that all Italian men were mummy's boys, was well received.

I had fun and Dwight fell in love sufficiently enough to warrant a visit the next weekend, but first we had to challenge the wildly inaccurate weather reports and head to the mountains for a few days of smoking rubber and tales of bravery. A few mountain passes, some mixed weather, about a hundred hairpins, a half a wild boar and a little mishap involving some soft tarmac later we were circling Lake Garda again. This time in a Citroen C2, which I was compelled to furbish with a Wunderbaum and a cd full of some lame Italian pop. The conclusion of the hundred-mile-long excursion was that the Thursday night action of a catholic nation is limited to jesters trying to steal porridge, some overpriced eastern bloc hookers selling their wares to truckers and a bar playing eighties music. No wonder kids stay t home until their forties...

Conquering the Dolomites. ©

The Pimpmobile. ©

After the C2 the bikes felt like rocket ships and riding around Verona with a hot chick in the back made me feel like Mr McQueen in his heyday. I'm sure I was living up to the dreams of all the little boys that wave at passing motorbikes.

Conan eat your heart out! ©

A mountain, a lake, some snow and a poser. ©

Passo Pennes about ten seconds before the hailstones started falling. ©

Since all good things have to come to an end before they become too complicated, me and Dwight headed for the twisties again. A couple of days hooning around the mountain passes, a quick blast through Austria and we found ourselves in Munich. The next morning I was in a ballet class sporting a borrowed jockstrap and some capoeira trousers feeling like a total knob. These other guys were actually working and trying to get ready for a show and I was there just pissing about in the middle of my holiday! I might have been rubbish in the class, but Philip Taylor's good taste in women made me forget all about it...

The very next day Dwight had to hit the road back towards Calais, and, with the good grace of Marcus and Gesine (Thanks guys!), I stayed in Munich for another night for the authentic German bathhouse experience at the Therme Erding, supposedly the best bathhouse in Europe. The sauna-experience is definitely very different from that of the Finnish sauna, or the saunas in the UK...

The next stop was Cologne where finding a dark little club to dance until dawn was compulsory and trying to sleep in next to the Dome on a Sunday morning was just plain stupid. Doing a few laps of the Nurburg Ring, The Green Hell, the next day wired up on caffeine was one of the most involving experiences I've ever had in my life. Fear and excitement are far more potent drugs than any synthetic ones I've ever sampled. Unfortunately by this time my camera had ran out of battery so I couldn't record my dilated pupils taking over my bloodshot eyes.

On Tuesday 3rd of july the ferry hit the pier in Rosyth and I was trying to get used to looking at the speedo and riding on the wrong side of the road again. Since then the Pakistani car washers have destroyed the finish of my bike's exhausts, e seagull has shat on me and my very old friend Teemu from Finland has tried to make me forget all of it through the ancient technique of cerebral marinading.

He's gone now and I'm still here five hours after I started writing this. Tomorrow, today, is the last day of the holiday before another long year of hard work. There are things I'm looking forward to, other things I'm weary of, some things I don't know what to think of and the rest of it will be just a big surprise when it hits my face. I might not be physically that rested, but at least I've mentally and emotionally been somewhere else. Bring on another season. I'm ready to give it a run for it's money.

Posted by Jarkko at July 8, 2007 05:02 AM