Month: June 2011

When I arrived in the UK, my first stop was Dover, to see the famed White Cliffs. Which are lovely.

After that, it’s been a bit of a debacle. My first night here I spent nearly five hours looking for a hotel room, finally falling into an available bed at nearly 4am after riding until the sky began to grow light.

I’ve already reconciled myself to the fact that I probably don’t have time to get to Jura, where I hope to visit the Shaw homelands.

But now? Now my motorcycle is due for a 6000 mile service (mostly oil change), and can’t get an appointment until at least Tuesday (in Nottingham, where I am currently), and at some dealers not for 2-3 weeks. I’ve been advised by a service manager in Edinburgh not to do the oil change myself, since there are apparently other checks as part of the 6k. I’ve also been advised not to stick with my Scotland plans with hopes of getting an appointment in London next Fri or Sat, as said plans will probably put me another 1000 miles or more past the interval mark.

Argh!

At this point I’m tempted to call all the dealers in London and see if any of them can help me out tomorrow. If so, I may just head there, get the needed service, and spend a few days in the southern part of the UK, blowing off Scotland plans entirely. Which is a disappointing option for me, admittedly, but I do need to be good to my trusty steed if it’s going to carry me as far as I plan to go.

Or, I could just drink a delicious alcoholic ginger beer and figure it all out later.

I am in love, and it makes me hurt.

Brugge, Belgium is quite possibly the most beautiful city I have ever seen. I’m staying just three minutes’ walk to the center square, and I’ve walked there three times in the 24 hours I’ve been here so far. I have, for the first time since arriving in Europe, thought that I could possibly live here. I’ve wandered down alleys and stopped to eat mussels and visited bars with more than 100 Belgian beers in bottle.

So has everyone else in the Western world. In his achingly funny European travel book “Neither Here Nor There”, Bill Bryson wrote:

Everything about it is perfect – its cobbled streets, its placid bottle-green canals, its steep-roofed medieval houses, its market squares, its slumbering parks, everything.

This was in 1990. In 2000, Brugge was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, and now the perfect market squares have Subway sandwich shops and Quick Burger shops and seemingly hundreds of shops selling chocolate and lace and wooden shoes (it is in the Flemish / Dutch region of Belgium, after all). Certainly less perfect, but still magical. Sadly, I have read that the citizens of Brugge hate the same tourists that many of them now count on for income, for destroying their sleepy, charming fairy village. This doesn’t surprise me – a similar sentiment was quite common on Orcas Island when I lived there, and is prevalent in many tourist areas.

This doesn’t change the magic here, but it does tarnish it for me, which is selfish and dumb and makes me a little ashamed of myself. It’s strange. I’m here, clearly, as a tourist (as I write this, I’m sitting in the cafe of a hostel catering very much to foreign tourists), but generally don’t feel like one. Since arriving, I have mostly wandered around neighborhoods and back alleys and parks in the various cities I’ve seen, tending to avoid the most obvious tourist areas, but Brugge is so small – and I’m so close – that it’s hard not to stumble onto these areas without even trying.

I feel like this is an experience I’m going to have often over the coming months. Navigating this internal dichotomy will, I suspect, prove an interesting growth opportunity.

I expect to be posting a few photos – and maybe videos – that try to capture the beauty of this little gem – in the coming days.

As always, thanks to everyone who reads and comments and sends me little notes of love and support during my travels. I am so grateful for the chance to live this dream and to have so many people virtually tagging along for the ride.

Consider for a moment a lush, pastoral coastal floodplain (those of you from Washington might consider the Skagit Valley or Nisqually Delta). Fill the countryside with farms, fields full of cattle, sheep and horses. Toss in the occasional small town, all the homes and buildings made of brick. Now stretch this out over six hundred miles of winding country roads and secondary highways, and put water everywhere – an ocean, inland lakes, big rivers, islands, working canals filled with locks and spanned by many small bridges. In order to make your way through the countryside, add ferries, bridges at least 10 miles long connecting Danish islands (and to Sweden), 16-mile (and longer) dikes splitting the North Sea into calm navigable basins north of Amsterdam.

This is the place I’ve ridden through over the last three days, and it has been heavenly. Everything is so lush and green in a way that is very reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest, yet uniquely European. From the cobblestone or brick paved streets of little Danish, German and Dutch towns to the ubiquitous bike paths – really everywhere: cities, small towns, 1.5 lane country roads, even the long dike – to thatched-roof country farmhouses that are directly connected at the rear of the house to the farm’s working barns, there is for me a most interesting sense of familiarity within otherness here. I find myself liking it a lot. Of course, this speaks to my love of western Washington and Oregon, with their similar green lush landscape, the islands and ferries and bridges, the smell of salt in the air.

This land truly is defined and shaped by water. The farmlands seem incredibly fertile, certainly in some part resulting from periodic floods of the Elbe and its tributaries. The Dutch have their enormous inland seas and canals with small personal boats and freight barges, northern Germany has the mighty Elbe River and the Nord-Ostsee-Kanal connecting the North and Baltic Seas, Denmark has 500 islands, many bridges and ferries and – like Amsterdam – working canals in the city. I found myself really enjoying Copenhagen, Groningen and now Amsterdam, my current location. To me there’s a magic to having waterways so integrated into the life of a city, boats next to cars and bicycles and scooters.

As has been previously noted in this space, I generally despise highway riding. This is due in part to a disinclination for high-speed riding, but more to the unpleasant experience of being overtaken by semis, trapped in the fast lane behind people going the speed limit +/- 5MPH, people careening wildly from lane to lane at speeds unsafe for the general traffic flow, and so forth.

After spending several days riding on the Autobahn, I feel that I must amend this to “I generally despise highway riding in the US”. Perhaps a testament to typical German efficiency, the Autobahn just works. As a result, it’s a far more pleasant riding experience, even at speeds higher than my normal high end. The fundamentals of Autobahn driving are as follows:

• Passing on the right is illegal.
• Lanes farther left go faster than those to the right.
• If someone comes up behind you going faster, move right to allow them to pass.

I’m sure there are a number of more complex rules and regulations to achieve efficient flow (this *is* Germany we’re talking about, after all), but the result of these basic rules is smoothly flowing traffic. One really nice bit is that trucks tend to drive slower than prevailing traffic, and thus stay in the right lane for the most part. Which is nice.

It’s a far more engaged riding / driving experience, mind you. Large portions of the Autobahn have effectively no speed limit, so people drive to the limits of their ability as drivers and the capability of their cars – I’ve had a number of times where I’m in the middle lane of three running at 120kph (~75mph) or more and someone flies past me (typically in a Mercedes, BMW, Audi or Porsche), clearly going at least 150-160kph (approaching 100mph), if not much more – I’m not so good at estimating speed of travel. This results in lots of lane changing for me – zipping over to the left lane to pass a group of vehicles plugging along at a mere 100-110kph, then back to the center or right lane once past. All the while checking mirrors to see if someone’s racing up behind me. And it’s actually fun!

The only time I’ve seen actual congestion on the Autobahn was in Hamburg on Friday, closing in on rush hour, and I’m pretty sure that was primarily due to a lengthy stretch of road construction that reduced lane count, constricted lane width and dropped speed limits to 100kph or less for several km at a stretch. Otherwise, it’s just smooth clean enjoyable riding, frequently at higher speed than I would consider on US highways, and it feels safe and controlled.

Something I have a hard time saying about my experiences riding a motorcycle on the US Interstate Highway system.

Copenhagen is a beautiful (smukke) city, particularly from the 15th-floor view of Annette’s (my couchsurfing host) apartment. I’ve been here two days, and have decided to stay two more, because a) one of my longest-held friends from WA is coming here tomorrow and b) I really quite like it here!

I arrived Friday evening, and fell in love with the city as I was riding through on the way to Annette’s place. This city has gorgeous old architecture, lots of sculpture all over, a billion bicycles, and really attractive people everywhere. What’s not to like?

Once I arrived, Annette handed me keys and a map, offered me a shower, and basically, she made me feel completely at home. After cleaning up, we headed out to a party being held at a coworking space where she used to work in the center of the city. The too-loud music and crowded dance floor led many to congregate in the kitchen, foosball room and courtyard outside. We talked for a while, enjoying Tuborg beer and people-watching, then decided it was time for sleep.

Yesterday was filled with tourist wandering. After a lazy morning, sleeping in and slow breakfast, we headed out to walk through the city. Along the water to visit the Little Mermaid, then to Nyhavn for delicious ice cream and people watching next to the canal in the sunshine. Thence on to the very modern-hippie village Christiania, where we saw people selling jewelry, clothing and other items of more questionable provenance. Sat and drank an sweet elderflower drink – like soda without the bubbles – which was delicious. Walked along the water – shoreline filled with people enjoying the perfect warm breezy weather – to a little foot and bike bridge where we sat and talked more. As the day lengthened, we headed to a grocery store and then back to her apartment where I cooked dinner (oh, how nice it has been to be able to cook for hosts a few times along the way!). Then we wandered into the city again, this time to a bar where her friend Lærke was making cocktails. We sat at the bar, chatted with Lærke, enjoyed some cocktails.

Being out late both nights has given me an opportunity to witness really long days. Copenhagen is far enough north that there is still the slightest bit of twilight all the way through the night, until predawn light starts filtering into the sky around 3am. Wild!

Annette is another long-distance solo motorcyclist – she rode solo from Buenos Aires => Ushuaia => NYC and has crossed the US three times, I think. Visiting and making friends with her has been fun and funny, enlightening, informational and inspiring. All because of couchsurfing!