From the Library

[Biggles]

Clancy arrived at  the garage to find their bikes had been cleaned, topped up with fuel and oil, and the tool bags supplied with metric spark plug adapters and a road map, for all of which their good Samaritan refused payment except for a short ride on the Henderson.
It was hardly surprising. The Dutch are model Europeans, and bikers are always friendly to each other, generally stopping to see if another rider stopped by the roadside is okay, and nodding to each other when they pass which, along with the visored helmets, the armoured suits and the gauntlets, always makes me think of them as modern-day knights.
Or possibly ants, the only other species to nod at each other as they pass.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p52

[Biggles]

What then followed was the worst ride of the trip so far.
Clancy set off at 5.30 p.m. on 'wretched roads' that shook him to a pulp, and by the time darkness fell at nine, he had only covered 60 miles. After an hour in which he saw neither a living soul nor a house, and now unable to see the holes and rocks in the road let alone avoid them, he fell twice, the first time smashing his light and the second almost breaking his leg.
He pressed on into the night, pushing the bike across countless rivers, until his nerve was badly shaken when the shadows at the bottom of a steep descent suddenly turned out to be a raging torrent.
"After a while I got so I didn't care - philosophically reflecting that one must die sometime and to die with one's boots on is very noble; so I rushed all the fords that came later, and surprised myself each time by reaching the other side alive. My dear old Henderson seemed to enjoy the excitement," he wrote in his diary.
With no moon and no lamp, he had to quit at last, and found a bed for the night in the 'crumbling village of Tordera, where, watched by the entire village, he had a late supper of coffee and toast'.
I wonder what he would made of the eight-lane motorway along which we sped at 80mph, or the smooth-surfaced side roads, bright with rapeseed, that led into Tordera. 
Which, by the way, is still crumbling away nicely.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p83-4

[Biggles]

In Italy
With the autostrada empty before us and a queue of cars and trucks coming the other way, it was like a perfect advertisement for motorcycling as we swooped and dived through bends as fast as we dared.
In the next half hour we were passed only once, by the driver of a scarlet Alfa who swept past us with a wicked grin, doing at least 130mph. As we were filling up at the next service station, a police car pulled up and the driver got out and walked over.
Whoops, I thought. "Nice bikes, guys," he said in flawless English. "The corners south of here are great, so enjoy them."
We laughed, and thanked him, and half an hour down the road we saw him pulling over a driver with Swiss plates, presumably to fine him for obeying the speed limit and then send him home for being more interested in money than the important things in life, like love, beauty and who won the football last night.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p88-9

[Biggles]

Tragically, what he had been about to say - that Bassolino had cleaned up the city centre, dealt effectively with its traffic problem and was tackling the stranglehold of organised crime, was drowned out by a group of well-dressed businessmen nearby shouting at each other at the tops of their voices while waving their arms around so extravagantly that it could only be a matter of time before one of them took off and rammed one of the few pigeons who still bothered flying in Naples.
"What are they arguing about?" I'd asked Antonio.
"They are not arguing. They are discussing last night's football match," he'd said over a constant racket of honking horns and policemen blowing whistles at Swiss motorists who had actually stopped for a red light rather than, like local drivers, accelerating through it.
Like Clancy, we rode south for a few miles and took refuge in the cypress glades of what was once Pompeii, where he paid 60 cents admission and, armed with a local guidebook and a well-thumbed copy of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's "Last Days of Pompeii", fought off a horde of guides offering to show him around for a mere $20.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p109-110

[Biggles]

As we were unloading the bikes, a local man pulled up on a dusty Africa Twin and came over for a chat. "Nice bikes, guys, although I prefer mine for off-roading he said. "What are the wheels on those?"
"The back's 17 inches, and the front's 19," said Gary.
"Hang on," I said, "does that mean the back wheel goes around faster and overtakes the front?"
"Aye, and it's happened to me several times."
Clancy, meanwhile, had left the Henderson in Naples and hopped on the express train for the four-hour journey to Rome after declaring the roads in Italy too wretched to even consider motorcycling because of the huge, square slabs left behind by the Romans and the dust which, when it was dry, clogged up the engine, and when wet turned to treacherous mud.
He would have been slightly surprised by the volume of traffic today, in a country whose government boasts a fleet of 629,000 official cars, ten times as many as the US government. And he would have been stunned to see the amount of motorbikes in Rome, from burbling Moto Guzzis through snarling Ducatis to the squadrons of buzzing Vespas.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p112

[Biggles]

"So how did you get into biking, Alfons?" said Gary, changing the subject in the nick of time.
"It's a weird story," said Alfons. "When I was at university in Antwerp, I got a scholarship to Santa Cruz in California, so I flew to LA, got a car for $20 on one of those one-way delivery schemes, then got lost in the worst part of LA after dark and ended up in a street where all the lights were broken and all the shops boarded up.
"Suddenly I saw lights about a mile away, and when I got there I saw it was a pub. I pulled up to ask for directions, all these Hell's Angels piled out and swarmed around the car, and I thought they were going to kill me.
"Instead, they led me to the freeway, invited me back for a rideout the following week, lent me a Harley Sportster,  then let me keep it for the three months I was there, so the moment I got home, I bought one, and I've been a biker ever since."
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p123

[Biggles]

As the Bulow docked in Nagasaki, Clancy emerged on deck, breathed in the salt sea air, and almost certainly grinned with pleasure to see, as his Henderson was lowered onto the dockside, a sight he had not seen for some time: roads.
Indeed, as he cranked the engine into life for the first time in weeks and motored north, the roads were so good that not even being restricted to 15mph by culverts, mysterious 90-degree bends, rickshaws and pony carts dampened his spirits.
Around him was a country more delightful, beautiful, peculiar arid above all different to anything he had ever seen, particularly the quaint habit of locals to dash out of their homes and into the road when they heard his horn, thinking it meant the arrival of the fried fish salesman, the pipe cleaner or the clog mender.
Still, apart from kamikaze pedestrians, rickshaws and carts, he had the roads to himself, since he saw no motorcycles and only a single car in his whole time in Japan. It is, as you can imagine, much the same today.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p171

[Biggles]

And so, at last, it was time to meet Dr Gregory Frazier, or Dr G, as he had become dubbed in our email correspondence. Or indeed Sun Chaser, the Indian name his grandfather had given him when he was four after his habit of running around the reservation chasing the sun.
It was a habit he carried into adult life: after a motorcycle racing career, he'd ridden around the world five times, the last time with a sixty-three-year-old grandmother of six who had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
Although she had never been on a motorcycle before meeting Dr G, she convinced him to take her around the world on the pillion in an adventure lasting fourteen months and covering nearly 30,000 miles.
In 2010, aged sixty-two, he announced that increasing costs, red tape and age had caught up with him, and he was giving up the gentle art of circumnavigation and was now going to spend the summers in the US and the winters in Thailand.
"It's likely I'll keep logging between 30,000 and 50,000 miles a year, but I simply plan on being more fiscally conservative and responsible during these lean economic times and less of a wastrel merely circling the globe," he said.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p191

[Biggles]

"Sacramento always has and always will be dead, they'll tell you in San Francisco, and they sure are right," fumed Clancy, who at least got some solace when one of the dealers invited him to a hill-climb challenge on a nearby railway embankment.
When the dealer's well-known twin-cylinder machine, probably a Harley, got stuck, Clancy climbed on his machine whispered to the old boy to do his best, and the Henderson responded with pride, sailing past the dealer with ease in spite of the 14,000 miles on the clock.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p194

[Biggles]

Since the roads were straight and empty and the sky was blue, I dumped my jacket in the top box and rode in shirtsleeves, savouring the sun and feeling like a boy on summer holidays.
Absolutely disgraceful and irresponsible, of course. Don't tell the Institute of Advanced Motorists, or I'll be thrown out; and whatever you do, don't tell Adelaide and BMW, since they think I'm working.
By lunchtime we were rolling into Ione, Washington which you'll be pleased to hear won the State volleyball championships three years running; and possibly surprised, since to call it a one-horse town would be a victory of marketing over reality.
The sole pub had long since closed, but the owner of the deli down the single street rustled us up some sandwiches and her husband rustled up a potted history of the town, which when Clancy passed through was a thriving railroad hub and wheat freighting town of several thousand souls served by six grocery stores, eight churches and three brothels.
Today the population was 340, and falling, because back then a grain farmer needed thirty or forty men to run his concern.  These days he just needs a combine harvester and an iPad app.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p206

[Biggles]

Further down the road, a series of billboards heralded the forthcoming week-long Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival, presumably culminating in a series of gala balls.
This, since you ask, is a celebration of the time of year when young bulls and rams are deprived of their family jewels, which are then fried and eaten as a delicacy known as prairie oysters. They are, by all accounts, delicious, but you'll have to take Rock Creek Lodge's word for it, since, although I've eaten everything from grasshopper to guinea pig, a chap has to draw the line somewhere.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p213-4

[Biggles]

Richard led the way around a tight bend, only to skid on some gravel then tumble off into the grass ditch.
He and the bike were fine, but as Murphy's Law would have it, two cops in a patrol car came around the bend a minute later. Still, after they'd checked his driving licence and were satisfied he was legally entitled to fall off, they let us go.
Lucky it hadn't happened in Singapore, or he would have got life for damaging the grass.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p222-3

[Biggles]

And then, at last, the holy grail: the only original 1912 Henderson in the world.
Of the fifteen or so Hendersons made in that year, John Parham knew of only three in existence today, and the other two had been restored with later parts, making this the only unrestored one, down to the original paint and tyres.
 And while Paddy Guerin's Henderson at the start of our trip had been a 1922 three-speed model, this was the real deal, with 7hp, one gear, a hand-crank starter and no front brakes.
I stood there looking at the motorcycle which would soon be joined by the effects of the man who had ridden one of them around the world a century ago, and as much as I had marvelled at Clancy's courage in making the journey we had followed, I now marvelled even more when I saw the machine he had done it on. To contemplate it was the act of a madman, and to complete it the act of a hero.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p225

[Biggles]

Naturally, now that we were handing back the bikes in couple of days, I had become almost proficient at riding mine. I could do tight circles at walking pace, and come to a dead stop at junctions, look around me, read War and Peace and then move off again, all without putting my feet down. Another million years of this, and I might even be able to go around bends half as fast as Gary did while he was standing on the pegs and taking a photo.
"You are getting better," he said when I mentioned it. "I actually saw you leaning into a corner the other day."
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p231

[Biggles]

The weather, as it had been pretty much every day in the States, was perfect, and I rode in a T-shirt along the freeway savouring the perfect harmony between the hot sun and the cool wind on my arms, and as we turned onto the backroads for the last few miles to the Clancy home, the chill of plunging into the shade of trees, then the warm balm of emerging again into the light.
As I said right at the start of the journey, motorcycling provides the simplest of pleasures.
I was savouring, too, the visceral growl of the engine beneath me. On its own, it was just a collection of metal bits and bobs, but brought to life by the spark of ignition, it could take you to wherever your heart desired; in the same way that the spark of inspiration had made Clancy set out around the world, had made Dr G spend sixteen years digging up dusty magazine articles to write Motorcycle Adventurer, and had made me realise as I read it how wonderful it would be to recreate that same journey on its centenary.
In Clancy's Boots  Geoff Hill  p232-3