The Elephant's Travels 2012

It is funny what you get good at. It isn't always the things you work at and practice.

Team Elephant (-) arrived in the northern Italian city of Chiavenna in blistering mid-afternoon heat after a long day on back roads though the Alps. The intention was to press on and to stop for the day near Lake Como but, by the time I had refuelled and rehydrated, I decided this dusty town would do just fine. At the railway station I found an accommodation desk and was offered a room in a village a few kilometres down the road. The price was right and I wasn't in a mood to be too discriminating.

We made an early start on our ride down to Trieste to try and avoid the worst of the heat. It was another hot day and by the time we had settled into a large room in what was once a palatial villa we were melting in our riding suits. Trieste is situated at the top of the Adriatic. It developed during the 18th and 19th centuries as a thriving port for the Austro-Hungarian Empire serving the hinterland that is now Slovenia, Croatia and Austria.

It is late night on 16 August 2012. Our motorcycle, Just Sue, is strapped down in the belly of a Dutch ferry. Jo and I are settled into a small inside cabin ready to catch a few hours sleep on the way to the Hook of Holland. We have been in the UK for more than five weeks which is three weeks longer than we had intended. The delay has been a misadventure bordering on farce; one of those sequences of events that seem so exceptional it is hard to believe it happened.

By the time Jo and I gunned Just Sue off the The Hook ferry and headed in a generally south eastern direction across Holland, we had plenty of pent up energy. We got the bike up to the best speed allowed on the restrictive Dutch freeways then crossed into Germany and got down to the real business. Despite holiday traffic, road works and the occasional radar we crossed Western Europe from the north west to the south east in a little over two days and rolled into Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in a blistering summer heatwave.

Our week of idyll with the family seemed to be over before it had properly started. Apart from being tourists, eating far too much and having the delight of spending a week with our little family, I also managed to fit new brake pads to Just Sue and give her an oil change. This proved to be a little bit of trial. The villa we were calling home was on a steep slope above the river, so I rolled the bike down and found the flat ground needed to do the oil change beside the road.

While Team Elephant's alpine wanderings were over for the year, we were still a long way from our London base and we decided to make the best of the journey. France has excellent motorways with a 130 km/h speed limit only spoiled by the toll booths every 20-50 km. These are so inefficiently run that, in some areas, where traffic is heavy and booths are frequent, most of the time saved by the road is lost in the administration. This, needless to say, isn't one of those charming French idiosyncrasies. But motorways are not motorbike ways.

 We wound our way south down through the French Alps then cut west and dropped onto the Côte d'Azur. This famous strip of land running from the Italian border to Toulon, the world's first mass tourist resort, was discovered and then developed by the British in the 19th century and has never really recovered from the experience.