Made it! 4753 miles in 7 days of traveling! That, without doubt, was the hardest thing I have ever done.
The first day was across France, Belgium and Germany, and was just dull motorways, endless, endless motorways. Even 125 mph on the Autobahn fail to enliven the day as the miles trundled past and I reached the German/Polish border and a well earned beer and a bed.
Second day and I'm missing the Autobahn already! Polish roads are a random mixture or brand new motorways starting and ending in the middle of nowhere and some of the smallest A roads I've been on. Borders come and go. Pine forests stretch as far as the eye can see, its Sunday night it must be Latvia.
Third day the roads are getting better, Latvia and Estonia are long sweeping A roads through more endless pine forests and Nordic farmland. The Estonian traffic police are very good, oops. The Russian border crossing is hidden in an anonymous carpark and is a nightmare of shouty Russian women endlessly stamping, signing and dating form after form after form. It takes 2 and a half hours to pass through and then we get to the main road. Road! Is that what you call it? I’d call it a potato field with white lines down the outside. Begin to think I may have made a mistake. Bike thumps and crashes over more potholes than tarmac but I don’t have a choice there are only holes nothing flat! Bus stops are a brief respite. New sections of tarmac mean that there will only be some really nasty stuff just round the corner. I can only manage 20 mph for fear of destroying the bike! Every mile I pass another Russian changing another flat tyre, KwikFit could make a killing here!
St Petersburg! My destination, 10:30 in the evening and the city is jumping, mad, mad traffic. The first accident across all ofEurope right in front of me! Proper motorcycle gangs on cruisers and sportsbikes race through the swirling, law ignoring traffic pulling wheelies and stoppies at will. For the first time in the trip I feel like the slow one.
After a day of rest and beer its time to move on, my friend guides me through the early morning traffic out of the city and onto Finland. Ah the pine forests! I’d almost missed them. This far north and its pine trees, summer roadworks, trucks, RVs and nothing else. Can’t go any further and stay the night well short of my destination and camp by the side of the Gulf of Bothnia.
Thursday, must be Sweden! Pine trees, pine trees, pine trees! Roads are lovely when not being resurfaced, by now I must have passed half the trucks, a third of all the RVs and most of the caravans inEurope, surely there can’t be any more! Again have to stop as I can’t physically go any farther, had a bit of a meltdown at 4pm today and forgot how to ride a bike, just sat there staring at the controls trying to remember what they did. Not good at 90 mph!
Friday, wake up on the other side of the Gulf with the water lapping the shore and the geese circling overhead. Its 6am and I’m feeling refreshed and ready for some serious miles. I have to catch up with the plan or else I’ll never get home! Race and swoop through Sweden on the most perfect mountain A road, all dips and humps and great open bends revealing an ever more perfect lake behind mile after mile of pine. I grin for hundreds and hundreds of miles, one tank of fuel after another with no-one to talk to and nothing to do but grin and overtake and sweep and grin. Denamrk is dispatched in a matter of hours, Germany rears its ugly head and the Autobahn returns. It rains! And it rains! 130 mph down the Autobahn, in the dark, in a rainstorm! Am I mad? Am I dreaming? Get to hotel outside Hamburg at 10pm having just completed 930 miles since I left the idyllic campsite this morning, strip off dripping gear, eat MacDonalds, drink beer, fall fast, fast asleep. Don’t ever let anyone tell you this trip was fun!
Saturday and I’m nearly home. Only 550 miles to the Channel, pah! I can do that by lunchtime. I am now moulded to the machine and no longer feel any pain from the movement and the wind. The bike and I are one! Hamburg, Breman, Brussels,Gent, nearly there, nearly there! Calais! Next stop home! Never have I been so pleased, so euphoric to see England and it’s not the White Cliffs that I miss it’s the M20, the Dartford Tunnel, the A13. Home!
4753 miles over some of the best and worst roads inEurope! Hours and hours, days and days of pine trees, petrol stations and endless overtakes. That was hard! Proper, proper hard! Please reward my pain with just a small donation.
Thank you
