NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/rec/motorcyc/40029

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Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ucla-cs!maui.cs.ucla.edu!noemi
From: [e-mail] (Noemi Berry)
Subject: The European Adventure, Day 9
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Date: Sun, 22 Nov 92 16:37:04 GMT
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This is the next installment in the tale of my 9-day
motorcycle adventure in Europe during the summer of '92.
I apologize for its length and hope that your news/mail
software will allow you to skip over it easily if it is
of no interest to you.

noemi
*--------------------------------------------------------*

10/21/92
The European Adventure
Day 9: The Day of the Autobahn

  Imeon and the daemon Adnoh were exiled from the promised land.  They
  were to wander into the midst of the unclean and the caged.  The wind
  and rain would beat and tear at their flesh.  The wounded Adnoh was to
  be imprisoned for the remainder of his days, while Imeon would return
  to dark and distant lands in search of new daemons to torment and slay.
                                   -Daemonthenese

Friday, September 4, 1992
Rosenheim, Germany

The German Autobahn is a fascinating venue, due mostly to its occupants.
Much of the autobahn has no speed limit, but when there is one, everyone
dutifully moves along with the speedo needle glued to the limit.  Drivers
keep to the right, even fast drivers, and only pass when there is no one
coming in the left lane for a long time.  When they pass, it is a quick,
efficient motion, like you would expect on a two-lane road.  None of the
"pass at velocity n + 1" so rampant in the USA.

Drivers pass each car separately, moving back into the right lane for even
100 meters before passing another car.  Drivers coming fast in the left
lane use their left turn signal, then their brights, to warn a lingering
passer in the left lane that they are about to be eaten alive.  Drivers
hardly ever need to pass on the right, but rarely do even when the need
arises.  The first in a line of cars stuck behind a slow vehicle in the
right lane is permitted to pull out first by the line of cars behind him,
provided the left turn signal is on.  Ah, if only the anarchy on the
American Interstates had even a fraction of this...!

I had been warned that the Autobahn is very extreme: when it's moving,
it's fast.  There are few accidents, but when there is one, there's not
much left.  When there's traffic, it's an engines-off proposition that
can leave travellers stuck for hours.  This is no lie.

I left my friend Chris' house in Rosenheim (about 45 minutes south of
Munich) at about 11am, in full rain gear, and headed into the foggy,
windy, rainy unknown.  I had to be back in Frankfurt by 6:30, knowing
it's about a 6-hour trip, so I had a reasonable safety margin of time.
What I didn't know was that Friday is notorious for bad traffic, since
is the day before the weekend.  But who would have thought that weekend
traffic starts before noon?!

Toward Munich it was threatening to rain and was extremely windy.  I
cursed at the heavy wind and remembered that I would rather ride in
rain than wind.  Well, I shouldn't have "said" anything: I got plenty
of both!  The FT was doing its valiant best against the conditions,
but at times wouldn't go past 120km/h.

There is no convenient way to get around Munich with highways; it was
either non-autobahn routes through Munich or an autobahn bypass (A99)
that made a wide circle around Munich on its east side, then a short leg
on a small route back to A7 toward Stuttgart.  My experience, especially
in Germany, was that going through cities takes a lot longer than
highways, so I opted for the autobahn bypass, A99.

As soon as I entered A99, the traffic came to a dead stop.  Lane-splitting
is illegal in Germany, so I waited while the rain picked up in earnest.
Since the traffic had completely halted, I figured it must be something
like construction or an accident and that I could wait it out, though
there was something undignified about sitting there being rained on.
Time pressure, discomfort and uncertainty made my blood pressure start
going up on an increasing scale.   To make matters worse, the clutch
action on the FT was heavy and clumsy, and with glove liners, gloves and
rubber rain gloves, it was near impossible.  The occasional creep forward
that could only be from impatient cars compressing ahead was torture on
my hands.

After about 20 minutes I was "rescued" by a Honda rider in a green rain
jacket who passed me lane-splitting.  He nodded at me as he passed, and
I said, screw it, I'm going too!  He was riding with both feet dragging,
apparently not so comfortable with lane-splitting.  Having cut my riding
teeth in L.A., this was old hat to me.

At least we were moving!  We rode past kilometers and kilometers of stopped
and creeping cars, and one sorry sidecarred GoldWing.  Too bad, guys!  It
was pouring rain and very cold, and even though I was moving, I wished
this would just END.  Once, the rider ahead of me hit a side-view mirror,
and the driver of the car got out and angrily yelled at him.  Phew, at
least it wasn't me!

This went on and on, and we passed HOURS worth of traffic.  I was going
to wait this out?!  The rain and wind did not let up at all, and I was
already very cold, very tired and very stressed.  Finally A99, the "fast"
bypass, ended in a route #471 that went through Dachau to A8.  We had
lane-split the entire bypass!  The route to A8 was also very crowded and
slow. I followed the Honda rider ahead like a rat behind the Pied Piper,
passing cars in their lanes, sometimes riding in the oncoming lane until
cars appeared.  The rider did nothing fast or unsafe; I think he knew I
was following him.  I thought I remembered the green jacket from a gas
stop before A99.

The small route finally led to A8, but not before another few km of a
one-lane exit from the route onto A8.  This time, we rode right past the
one lane of cars on their left, essentially in the oncoming lane!  This
was more rude to the long line of stopped cars than unsafe to us, since
there were very few oncoming cars.  When a car came along the other way,
we'd just move back into our lane in plenty of time, then pass hundreds
and hundreds of stopped cars again.  This went on up a curved entrance
ramp, too, where an occasional car jutting out forced us to stop.  I had
developed a one-foot technique for stopping on hills (and steep Alpine
passes!), and prayed my rain boots wouldn't slip.

FINALLY we made it to A8!  It'd been a grueling hour...two?  Who can tell?
And we hadn't even made it out of Munich yet!  The traffic was just unreal,
with no obvious cause other than just too many cars.

But A8 was just as bad at first, and I followed my leader through a few more
km of lane-splitting.  Once we passed a stuck Polizei: if lane-splitting is
illegal, I guess it's tolerated under certain conditions.  By now the skies
were committed to a solid day of heavy rain, too.

The traffic unexplainably picked up, but there were so many cars we couldn't
cruise past 80 km/h, and there were still frequent slowdowns and total stops.
Lane discipline no longer applied, and my green-jacketed rider and I kept
passing and being passed by a tour bus that was also searching for the
optimum path through the traffic.  One time my leader looked back for me
and all he saw was the bus: it had moved right into my lane, and I had
safely SIPDE'd my way behind it.  I was very grateful when I saw my
leader give helmeted dirty look to the bus driver on my behalf.

The riding was extremely stressful with so much traffic, rain and wind,
but I was falling behind schedule and so didn't stop to thank my leader
when he pulled over for gas.  If you ever see a rider on a Honda (couldn't
tell the type), license plate FP574, tell him he saved my butt that day.
We waved at each other for a long time, since we had spent hours riding
together.  Suffering fosters kinship, I guess.

I stopped outside of Ulm for gas, frazzled.  It was already 2:30pm and I'd
ridden only 166km in 3 hours, in relentlessly pounding rain and wind.  I rode
into Ulm anyway, deciding to chance it and fulfill an earlier mission: find
Hein Gericke and buy my boots.  I had already called and gotten directions
and asked them to set aside a pair of size 37.  Remember that having a size
37 foot means that it is not unreasonable to go out of your way for
comfortable, well-fitting boots!

Ulm was also a traffic nightmare, and I cursed my complusiveness as I sat
through multiple cycles at every light.  After missing a crucial left, I
ended up circling around and doing it all over again.  My stress level went
out of control while riding around Ulm for half an hour, but I had already
invested enough time that I was a victim of entrapment.

When I found the HG store, the operation was swift: I paid my DM, strapped
my hard-won boots to the FT and was out of there in less than 5 minutes
(I had tried a pair on in Paris, so knew they fit -- prices were much
higher in France for HG stuff).  I asked at the HG store what the best
way back to Frankfurt would be, and they said A8 through Stuttgart to
Karlsruhe, then north on A5 to Frankfurt.

Back on the Autobahn, there were lots of cars and traffic kept slowing
down.  I contemplated removing my rain gloves, but then the rain would
just start again.  I did take off my rain gloves at one stop, but then
it started to rain *hard*, and I tried to put them back on while moving.
Ungood!  I did succeed at one, but at the cost of a lot of distraction
and having my left hand unavailable while I struggled to free three
fingers from the rubber thumb.

Stuttgart to Karlsruhe just *sucked*.  I never got going more than 10km
without some sort of slowdown.  Three of these were accidents; one of
which was of the "not much left" variety.  By the third half-hour-long
engines-off traffic jam, I had no regard at all for the law and
lane-splat right past the Polizei.  Occasionally another rider would
follow *me*!  Through all this, the wind and rain were without mercy.

Parts of the autobahn had serious construction going on, and so for many
kilometers at a time, there was just a tiny plastic barrier between me
and oncoming traffic, with narrow lanes and heavy, slippery, blinding
rain.  I prayed and prayed for these stressful sections to end, trying
very hard to keep my frustration under control.  Will this rain and wind
PLEASE give me a break?!  How many hours of this did I have to endure?
I hadn't had more than 10 minutes at a time of plain old cruising.
I was very, very upset and spent a lot of the time crying miserably
inside my helmet, like a terrified little kid.

I knew I desperately needed a warm-up and sanity break, but it was almost
6pm by now.  I called Claude from a gas station outside of Karlsruhe and
told him I would be late returning the FT.  He could hear my voice
shaking and said very kindly, don't worry, just drive slow (hah!) and
bring it back tomorrow morning.  Oh, would I have loved to do that!
I wasn't far from Heidelberg and could have really used some of Bill's
kind attention.  But I *had* to get back to Paris tonight.  Next time,
I'm leaving more time at the end!  Claude was extremely nice and calmly
offered to wait for me.

Now I felt even more pressure to get back; I hated to keep him waiting!
I booked to Karlsruhe, then got onto A5, the home stretch of the autobahn
to Frankfurt.  Thankfully, this one was 3 lanes wide and I was finally
able to cruise as fast as I could take it on my faithful thumper (about
140km/h, hardly comfortable!).  I made it to Frankfurt in decent time,
considering it's usually a two-hour trip for Germans, and proceeded to
get lost in Frankfurt.  Through some miracle, I happened upon Eckenheimer
Landstrasse, from a completely opposite direction than I thought I was
going.  But now I had found the right street.  I rolled into Claude's
parking lot at about 8:30pm, exhausted and on the verge of mental
collapse.  Photographs show that my face was very red from hours and
hours of cold, wet air on my face.

Again, a miserable day was rescued by the kindness of strangers.

A young woman who I had seen there when I picked up the FT offered me a
drink, and assured me that I hadn't held them up, she and her boyfriend
Mark were waiting for Claude anyway.  She offered to drive me to the train
station (saving me a 1km walk and a U-bahn trip with all my gear), and then
insisted I wait for the 11pm train at her apartment, which was close to the
train station.  They couldn't understand why I went through Karlsruhe:
they thought I should have taken A7 north toward Wurzburg, and then A6
west toward Frankurt!  Well, I had just followed a recommendation from
the guy at the HG store in Ulm.

They asked me how the FT was, and I said, great!  Ummm, but it has a
funny noise now.  A bracket between the exhaust pipe and the cylinder
had come off and was allowing loud sputtering noises to come out.  And
I'd had some oil level troubles.  Oh, and it has a new clutch lever.
Oh yeah, and a passenger peg had disappeared somewhere along the way.
They looked hard at me.  "Anything ELSE?!"

Birgit (that was her name) rode also; in fact the FJ1200 on which I had
seen Claude belonged to her, and she also had a Suzuki Katana 1100.  She
takes trips by herself on her FJ all the time, and agreed that a woman
travelling alone by motorcycle is not terribly common.  What really
impressed me is that she wasn't that tall, 164 cm (5'4"), and she rides
ANY motorcycle.  Her job there involved test-riding and inspecting any
motorcycle that Claude worked on, including the gigantic Paris-Dakar
style bikes, like Honda Africa Twins or Yamaha Teneres.

Claude showed up with his new purchase: a Yamaha Super Tenere.  I asked
Birgit to sit on it so I could see how much foot she had on the floor.
"Why?" she asked, puzzled as to the relevance of this statistic!  The
very end of her toe touched down on one side, and the other foot did
not reach at all.  She said you put one foot solidly down because it
doesn't look cool to be teetering on two toes :-).  I asked her about
parking, stopping and dropping, and her response was always, "no
problem!".  It just never occurred to her that being short was a
problem.  A very valuable perspective.  Birgit didn't consider tall
motorcycles to be any more of a problem than a skateboard.

Birgit had been riding for 10 years, was an experienced traveller
as well as being exactly my age.  She was a real inspiration, and
talking to her finalized a growing feeling I had that being less
than 5'2" means there are only SOME motorcycles I can't ride, rather
than MOST.  It will take a long time to feel ready to one-foot a
tall, topheavy Paris/Dakar style bike, but now I know it can be done.

Birgit and Mark took me back to their apartment, gave me dinner and
offered me a shower.  When they found out I'd be on the train all night,
they offered to let me stay with them overnight and take the first train
in the morning, which I had to decline.  But how kind!  I made the best
of my time talking to them, though, asking about how they felt about
German reunification, the Yugoslavian conflict and everything I could
about their motorcycling history.  They were both well-educated and in
graduate school, so their English was excellent.  We exchanged addresses
and I left feeling like I'd made some good new friends.

At the train station, I spent the rest of my German coins on food and
got on the train.  Though I hadn't made a reservation, I was lucky that
my compartment wasn't full, so I was able to lay across two seats and
sleep off a very, very long and trying day.

But I couldn't sleep.  All I could think about was my wonderful trip
and motorcycles.  Especially my OWN long-awaited NM (next motorcycle).
Though my time in the Alps was over, I knew that I'd just done one
of the best things in my life, a memory I would cherish always.

End of Day 9.

noemi
*---------------------------------------------------------------------*
[e-mail] (for now)                     KotSBL
DoD #443                          '82 KZ 305 CSR
                            (R.I.P)
    Next Motorcycle (NM) countdown: one R65LS to go!
*---------------------------------------------------------------------*