Back to Noémi's Euro 1992 moto adventure
Why indeed.
That off-the-cuff analysis of motorcycle travel was actually quite accurate, though it completely missed the point. If someone told me that someday I would spend a week touring the European Alps alone on a motorcycle, less than a year after I wobbled through the first MSF safety class, I would have permanently wrinkled my face with skepticism.
Instead, I permanently wrinkled said face by doing exactly that.
But let me start at the beginning. I'd been riding for about 9 months and 12,500 miles, all on a oil-hungry Kawasaki 305 CSR. I finished my sentence at UCLA in mid-July, and as promised, the ink was not even dry on my degree before I moved my things into storage in the SF Bay Area, and took off eastward for an almost impromptu 6-week trip to Europe. One wonderful week of this trip was spent on a motorcycle.
My trip in Europe was based in Paris, at the home of a good friend of my mother's, Francoise. After getting used to being in France again and scouting out the local Patissiers, I took a 2-week cage trip with my sister Stephanie. One of my intentions was to go to Germany to scout out motorcycle rentals and to buy leather pants and boots. This trip was full of road- and motorcycle-related discoveries and is worth mention, but not a writeup here.*
*2019 Note: Now I really wish I'd written up that car trip with my sister, who we tragically lost to cancer this year at the age of 53. Then, that trip and so many other times like that were just what sisters do together, when we had all our lives ahead, when we were going to outlive our husbands be old ladies together with a passle of cats and arguing over curtain fabric. Now those totally normal times together have been elevated to precious, beholden memories. Had we only known at the time.... but I'm glad we didn't. That trip was all about reinforcing the cliche of youthful optimism and invincibility.