Day 70
The madness is still with us and four years after leaving the UK on my RTW trip and it is still disrupting my travel plans, borders are still closed or heavily restricted. Some countries are demanding that people who want to enter their country must have taken the experimental gene therapy injection or they must get “tested” or both. I had now been in Krakow for about 8 months and nothing has changed to the East, all roads are still closed. I needed to get on the bike and start travelling again, if only to obtain a bit of sanity.
As I was largely confined to (imprisoned in) Europe by the madness and my options for free and unrestricted travel were limited. My friend had suggested that I return to visit him in Galicia and as the madness of lockdowns, quarantines, and other sundry insane laws precluded me from doing something other than that, I decided to take him up on his offer. In my planning for the trip, I learned from the published information on the German Government website that I would only be able to transit through Germany. The prevailing insanity dictated that I was not allowed to stay in the country in excess of 24 hours and I was unable obtain any form of accommodation. According to the information on the French Government website I could not eat or drink in a restaurant but I could get a hotel room, another fine example of insane thinking in action. So armed with this knowledge on the morning of 4 August 2021 I left Krakow for Spain and my first stop was near the Polish/German border in the town of Boleslawiec where I found a nice hotel for about 22 Euros a night but as I settled down for the night so did the rain.
Day 71
The next morning it was still raining and it was cold for the time of year, about 11 degrees celsius. I was not looking forward to the prospect of transiting Germany in one day but needs must so I rode to the border where to my surprise I found nothing, no checkpoints, no testing stations, no border guards nor police. I rode on through Germany and towards France on the Autobahn where my route took me past Dresden, Nuremberg, and Stuttgart to my final destination, Strasbourg. It was motorway all of the way and it was cold and wet, all of the way. Not one of my best days and as I approached the German/French border guess what I found? Yes that’s correct, nothing (again).
So this is where I need to have another little rant.
If there really was a deadly airborne virus capable of killing people circulating, and if contagion is a real phenomenon, then there would have been measures in place to stop people crossing borders, but there were none. Only people who used any form of “public transport” such as buses, trains, and planes were subjected to mask mandates, vaccination mandates, and other forms of insane treatment by those in power, people like me who travelled by their own transport were largely unaffected. This fact alone should have made any reasonable person sit up, notice the glaring contradiction, and question all of the insanity, but sadly most people never did and they just accepted all of the restrictions on their lives without complaint.
Anyway, I arrived in Strasbourg about five in the evening and found my way to my hotel. It was a low end chain hotel but the price was over 50 Euros for 1 night and not good value for money. By the time I had settled in and showered, it had stopped raining so I decided that I needed to walk in to the city. I had last been in Strasbourg around 2005 so I wanted to see if it had changed any since my last visit and I took a footpath that ran alongside the river and after about 30 minutes or so I was in the city. Nothing much had changed from how I had remembered the city centre but I did notice that it seemed a little grubby here and there. I sat in cafe and had a coffee and a cigar, no-one stopped me or even cared. As I smoked my cigar and hoped for better weather, I could not help but mull over in my mind the total inaccuracy of the information I had obtained from official Government websites when planning my trip.
I decided to walk back along the river bank to the hotel and I took a slightly different route, one that hugged the riverbank and on the way I encountered this sight on more than one occasion. The Europe that I had previously visited, it had changed, and definitely not for the better.
Day 72
The next day when I awoke it was again cold and it was raining again. I rode South from Strasbourg passing Bescanon and Dole, and then I headed inland towards Clermont Ferrand, and as I rode on the rain stopped and started constantly. At one point in the journey around mid afternoon the rain stopped for a while and as the skies began to clear a little I was eventually able to stop and take a photograph of a picturesque hill top town.
Eventually, later that afternoon I stopped in the town of Montauban which is just North of Toulouse, where I found a quiet guest house by the river on the outskirts of the city that was run by a man and his son. After a conversation with the owner it turned out that for a time in the 1980’s he worked as a waiter in a hotel about five miles from where I used to live in Glasgow. It is indeed a small world.
Day 73
The next morning it was raining again and still cold. I set off heading South West, passing the towns of Auch and Pau on my way to the Spanish border. I got there about midday and guess what? Again nothing. The skies had cleared when I was just West of Donostia San Sebastian and sun had come out. It was getting warmer and it was the first time that I had been warm since leaving Krakow. I had booked accommodation for that evening in a town South of Pamplona but as I rode my thoughts wandered and I found myself on the wrong road and to turn back and get on to the correct road, would have added over three hours extra on to my journey.
It was five hours from where I was to my friends house so I decided just to push on and get to my friends house before dark. 5 hours later I was riding along the N120 about 5 miles (8 km) from the exit to the village where my friend lives when the engine of my bike went BANG! and then died on me. After a few phone calls a van appeared and my now dead bike was carried the final 5 miles to my destination. After a day or so I bit the bullet and stripped the engine down to find out what had happened. Long story short is that due to a lubrication failure the piston overheated and then melted but at least what is left of the piston makes a good ashtray!
