Adventures in Europe Part 1

At the age of sixteen, I hit a number of milestones. I got a boyfriend (a real, serious boyfriend), left school, got a job, travelled through Europe on the back of aforementioned boyfriend’s motorbike - a Moto Guzzi Le Mans Mk II.
The boyfriend was one of the local ‘bad boys’ – legendary for various reasons throughout the ranks of the teenage girls in school. He had long hair, a motorbike and a reputation. For a young girl like me, that was a heady, irresistible combination. I consented to ‘go out’ with him in mid-April, less than a week after he first asked me.
He’d pick me up from my friend’s house because her mother worked and no one was at home during the day. That arrangement saved time and complicated questions – his parents didn’t know I was still at school and my parents didn’t know I was bunking off school most afternoons.

By June/July, we were making plans to go on holiday (vacation) together. Then one afternoon we went to Nottingham, to a motorcycle showroom. I seem to remember they sold Kawasaki motorcycles. We weren’t there for a Kawasaki; we were there to look at a different breed – a Moto Guzzi. As you can guess from reading the first paragraph of this, he bought the Guzzi and we continued with our plans.
In early August, he picked me up from work, took me to his house and we packed the bike up and we were on our way to Dover.
We travelled 27 hours that first stretch of the journey. We didn’t know much about travelling abroad and we had to learn as we went. It was a steep and sometimes uncomfortable learning curve, but we were young, adventurous and eager to learn.
What we could have benefitted from knowing was that the motorways in France are really traveller-friendly – they have camping sites at frequent stages along their length. We avoided the motorway to begin with because we assumed they’d be the same as in England – camping forbidden. Not so at all! The camping sites may be basic, flat grass for pitching a tent, and toilets and water, but the knowledge would have saved us a lot of time and effort. As it was, we both worked a full day before starting out and by the time we found a campsite and set up the tent, we were both exhausted and only as far down France as Lyon.
We eventually made it down to St Tropez where we had planned to stay a few days before moving on to Italy. We camped at St Raphael, a town a few miles from St Tropez, on a flat, parched field at the bottom of a hill strewn with grapevines. The only facilities were all the way up that hill and across the top of it, to the ancient outside brick toilet and shower next to it – with no hot water. I have to admit, the dusty field made the shock of the cold water bearable – just.
A puncture meant we had to extend our stay for an extra day. The tyre, a Goodyear Eagle, one of the first tubeless we’d ever encountered, was repaired with the kit brought with us for just that reason. Unfortunately, the tyre just wouldn’t ‘seat’ properly, we couldn’t get enough PSI (Pounds per Square Inch) into the tyre fast enough to ‘pop’ the tyre onto the rim of the wheel – hardly surprising really, all we had was the mini hand pump he’d stolen from his gran’s wheelchair before we set off.
A couple of Irish lads offered to take the wheel to a garage and get it seated using a pneumatic pump. They wouldn’t accept any money as payment when they delivered it back to us fully seated and inflated.
We took one trip into St Tropez itself and decided not to bother again. One beer and one lemonade cost us more than the accommodation at the campsite for the week.
On the way back from the beach, we saw a crowd gathering at one of the stores in the plaza, and loaded with a large bag of leather jackets, helmets, jeans etc that we lugged around, we set it down to watch. The store sold televisions and they had set a few speakers outside so passers-by could watch with sound.
Two English teenagers, eating sticks of French bread, watched the most iconic wedding of the 20th century alongside European neighbours.
Prince Charles and Princess Diana, their wedding broadcast across the globe delayed us for perhaps an hour. We stood in the glorious South of France sunshine, our own relationship barely months old, neither couple knowing what lay in the future.
After we had watched enough, we got back on the Guzzi, made our way back to the campsite, had a freezing cold shower and looked at the magnificent stars. The two Irish lads’ father (we think) had to explain why it was so dark so early. We didn’t even know to put our watches forward an hour when we got to France.
After we left St Raphael, we continued with our planned tour and made our way toward Italy.