Running around

I’ve been back on my old F650 for six weeks and I want to say again how happy I am with the old girl.
I brought her out of her dusty retreat after two years, brightened her up with a new battery, and sailed off down the autobahn to Stuttgart to celebrate my 78th birthday.

My splendid lemon-yellow transcontinental taxi – the F650 I keep parked in Duisburg, which takes me all over Europe

The next day we went further south to Bavaria where I spent the night as the guest of that rare phenomenon, a modest, generous and pleasant multi-millionaire. Roland deserves a big blog all of his own, but he’s a remarkable engineer who built up a tremendous business on his own and then fell in love with the Wild West, which is where I met him of course.

I shall have to come back to him another time.

The next stop was going to be Montpellier, in the south-west of France, where I have old friends, but from Munich it’s a long ride, through Switzerland, so I stopped the first night in Voiron, in the French mountains of Isere.
I’m glad I did, because it’s close to the Carthusian monastery of Grande Chartreuse who make what is probably the most delicious liqueur ever sipped in this vale of tears.

If you’ve never tasted green chartreuse, rush out now and repair the omission. You will thank me.
With the bike running as comfortably as a diesel taxi I arrived, a happy man, in Montpellier where old friends gave me a rapturous welcome.

When you’ve just had a birthday you really need your friends.
I hung around for a few days, until Angel and Teresa from Spain turned up on their 1200 RT and we set off for Madrid.
All of Spain, it seems, is discovering the joys of motorcycling, and so many of them want to read my book that it justified a whole new edition. Angel and Teresa have done a new translation of Jupiter’s Travels, and they did a truly beautiful job.

The book is full of pictures and illustrations and has the size and heft of a bible. We had a date, four days later, to present it at a big bookshop in Madrid, so we had three days to get there.
Those were three fine rides.

First to Girona, where I had been only once so long ago that I had forgotten everything. It’s a beautiful old city, and there was a festival of flowers on. We had to run around a lot to find a hotel, but there were compensations: Huge flower arrangements floating down the river, and a very funny floral “crime scene”, complete with tape and a victim’s body rendered in horticulture.

This was the scene

And here’s the victim

We went to a profoundly authentic bodega where I bought a lot of wonderful red wine called Pais Negre for one euro a pint, highly recommended. Next stop was Zaragossa, 250 miles or so, where I saw many interesting things but can only remember being enthralled by the world’s most fidgety man. And from there over some pretty high passes to Madrid. But first I must tell you about a funny thing that happened outside Girona.
You can read about it here
or you can go on to other stuff.

Ted Conquistador
(Por los que hablan espagnol haz click aqui)

I seem to have made a lot of people laugh in that book shop in Madrid. Perhaps they were laughing at my Spanish. I was there helping to introduce a new translation of Jupiter’s Travels My new friends, Angel Sanz and Teresa Garcia, have teamed up to publish this beautiful new version. The reception promised much success. They plan to translate and publish more of my books soon and I couldn’t be happier.