La vie en rose
In holiday mode and well away from marauding squadrons of mosquitos we spend a couple of days in the clean mountain air of La Plagne – in winter a hectic ski resort, in summer busy with hill walkers and mountain bikers. But this is the “inter season” and the town is deader than a deceased thing on National Catatonia Day. I rent a little ski instructor’s flat in one of the blocks for a couple of days and it’s seriously weird to look out at all the apartments and hotels, not one of which has a light on at night. My friend and I do lunch in the only bar open at lunchtime, and grab a beer in the only bar open in the evening, which closes at 9. After a day’s chilling and a trip down to the (almost alive) town down the valley Tenere and I are back on the road, chain lubed and adjusted for the first time since Osijek, no other maintenance required.
It's not too far to my cousin’s place, a beautiful old house in a medieval town that’s definitely not dead, and where French is the only language to be heard - though waiters in the cafes immediately spot my schoolboy French and switch into perfect English. The bike rests in the cool cellar-cum-garage while I am treated like a king and shown the delights of the area. The years fall away and pretty soon we’re those teenage kids again, laughing and playing under sunny Irish holiday skies.
The road is calling for my final stint back home. I’m not going to rush, planning night stops in Rocamadour and Saumur before catching the boat at Caen back to the UK, which has been basking in a heatwave while I dodge the raindrops in Europe. Neither night stop goes particularly well, arriving soaked in Rocamadour in no mood to explore the old town, and having to wait for the hotel reception, another one-man band with no restaurant, to open at 4.30. Saumur turns out to be another 1960s type hotel, but this time in the style of a low budget motel, where all the rooms have external doors, reception doesn’t open until 5 and self check-in doesn’t work because it ran out of key cards. It hurls down with rain while I’m waiting to get in, luckily I can shelter and later when the rain has passed I walk to a chain restaurant for a very acceptable burger. Only the French would ask you how you want your meat done, and happily I have learned that I like it “à point”.
Watching the Le Mans car race on the room TV I realise that my route tomorrow, the last day of this epic not epic trip, takes me through Le Mans with the likelihood of the roads being jammed with thousands of overheating Porsches. I resolve to make an early start to get through the town well before the race finishes.
First thing in the morning my stop is the Musée des Blindés, the French Army’s tank museum. Being a bit of a geek I love stuff like that. It’s not as big as Bovington Camp in Dorset, but still a couple of hours well spent.
We pass Le Mans in good time with no major delays and time to spare before the overnight ferry, predictably with all cabins booked by the Le Mans crowd. I did a little tour of some of the D-Day sites when I was in Normandy before, but I missed the Pegasus Bridge. The sense of history when you see these places, before only names but now real, is incredibly poignant. If only the human race would learn the lessons of the past, but it never does.
Finally we board, a couple of last pints in the ship’s crowded bar and an uncomfortable sleepless night in the recliner seats listening to some bloke on the floor snoring like a rhinoceros. Portsmouth, 20 minutes delay while UK border force (who couldn’t possibly set up in France while we were queuing for the boat) crawl over all the campervans and look in car boots in case a dark skinned person might try to get into blessed Albion, the A31 at rush hour and it’s all over. 3 weeks, 4,000 miles, 10 countries, just like that.
If it doesn’t come naturally, leave it
Writing this, a week later, I still don’t really understand what happened. Turning back felt like the right decision at the time, and it still does. Yet how could I want something so much, plan for so long, yet be deterred by something so seemingly trivial? The closest I think I can get is this:
• Dreams and reality are not the same. Have your dreams, but remember that the reality may be different and you may have to choose between the two.
• Age is not just a number. As you get older your body finds it harder to take the aches from long days in the saddle. You can’t comfortably ride as far, so it takes you longer to get places, and if “places” are a long way away, that means a long time covering a lot of empty miles.
• I’m not somebody who could live on the road. I already knew this, but I thought a trip “there and back” would be purposeful enough to be worth the extended time away from home. But as it dawned on me that I would be facing either a succession of exhausting days seeing nothing but the road, or a much longer succession of shorter days and lonely hotel rooms, the attraction of riding alone, for weeks at a time, faded.
• This trip should have happened 5 years ago but stuff kept happening to push it back, and even earlier this year as I was getting ready to go lots of stupid things kept happening – visa offices closing without notice, a dead laptop, the bike problems, the errant satnav – and that had started to get to me. I got over all those little problems and of course people have got over far bigger ones on their dream trips. I’m not religious or superstitious but I couldn’t get rid of that little voice.
Memento mori
So the trip of a lifetime turned into more a voyage of self-discovery, who’d have thought it? Am I disappointed? Hell yeah. Embarrassed? Also yeah. In hindsight I should just have gone, no fanfares, turned my sights east and seen where the road took me. That’s more along the lines of real adventure travel anyway, and if you don’t set a target you won’t fail to hit it. But did I enjoy it? For sure I hated the first thousand miles. But with the decision made a weight came off my mind and I started to have fun. The road miles were taken with a light heart, I soaked in the sun and the glorious scenery I passed through, the crappy hotels were something I could laugh about and the joy of catching up with friends and family lifted my soul. Because that’s what travel at its best does for you. Maybe not hardcore adventuring but holiday riding, there’s nothing to beat it. So is it the end of adventuring for me? No, but it’s a lesson learned, that the truly hardcore stuff isn’t my forte and that I need to be aware of my own limitations and preferences. There are still adventures to be had, but I’ll be doing them my way and in my own time. In the meantime I’ll enjoy reading about the adventures of others with a mixture of envy and admiration, and dreaming about the distant horizons that I will visit in future.
Which is Motosunburn signing off for now. My gofundme page to raise a few pennies for Devon Freewheelers Blood Bikes will be closing shortly but is open for a few more days, so please consider bunging in some loose change to help run this lifesaving charitably funded service:
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A ... q6Vx4fwSee you on the road!
) I got spectacularly lost 
but he has lovely cats and a lovely house. In the village/small town where he lives, there used to be 3 factories employing the local population including one making shoes for most of Yugoslavia. After independence the Croatian authorities weren’t interested in subsidising the factories so one by one they closed, and the town population shrank to about 3,000. 50% of the houses are now empty, the kids move away as soon as they can because there’s hardly any work and the few shops and cafes scratch a living. On the plus side, it’s a beautiful location, the weather is kind and you can buy a big house with land for less than the cost of a one bedroom flat in Gateshead.
