From the Library

[Biggles]

I strolled back to the bike and sat astride it for a while, smoking, thinking, feeling a bit dislocated. The guy who looked after the car park walked over and said hello. He'd been admiring my bike, he said, rode one himself, and told me how he dreamed of hitting the road one day.
 His name was Marc. He'd signed up for the Romanian secret service after leaving college "thinking I'd be tracking people down on my motorbike", but he'd been put in an office in a suit where he typed up reports all day until he could stand it no longer and quit. Now he was looking after this car park until something came up and he could afford to take his road trip.
"But with the money I earn here, maybe this is something I never get to do," he said, and held his shoulders in a shrug and turned his palms towards the sky. "But I dream about it all the time. You are living my dreams. You are a very lucky man."
Sons Of Thunder p169-70  Mike Carter

[Biggles]

It had begun to rain again, with the odd low growl of thunder thrown in for the requisite Transylvanian ambience. Just as I was about to pull over and make camp, the forest ended and I emerged somewhere in the sixteenth century.
The main street of the Roma village - just hardened clay really, turning swiftly to mud - was full of horses, and oxen, pulling carts piled high with straw, the drivers in pork pie hats, ancient bolt-action rifles slung over their shoulders.
Wizened old Roma women in headscarves carried their grandchildren on their backs in slings fashioned from rugs. There was a hand pump in the street from which villagers were drawing water. People sat out on their steps to watch this strange creature pass, and scruffy, shoeless urchins chased after me.
I felt a tad vulnerable, uncomfortable. Five years earlier, I had been in Romania's most cosmopolitan city imagining I was in mortal danger. Now I was in the middle of the forest, in the middle of nowhere and darkness closing in, and I was drawing a crowd, many of whom were armed. It's not easy to be inconspicuous riding a 1200cc motorcycle through a Brueghel painting.
Sons Of Thunder p170-1 Mike Carter

[Biggles]

Before I knew what was happening, a succession of small boys were carrying my luggage into the room. Shortly after, the entire village came round to see the stranger. There was lots of giggling and nudging and I poured my vodka into small glass tumblers and chipped mugs and then I cut my sausage into slices with my Leatherman and offered it around.
But they weren't too keen on the sausage and instead the woman of the house produced a steaming tureen of sour soup with pork and beans, and we slurped it and ate heavy, dark bread, and drank more vodka. They spoke Romanian and I spoke English and we seemed to get along just fine. Vodka makes polyglots of us all.
I went through my guidebook's conversations and essentials section and tried to ask my host in Romanian what his name was, but I don't think I pronounced it correctly as he kept pointing to his hat.
Sons Of Thunder p171-2 Mike Carter

[Biggles]

The greatest hazard was still the horse-drawn carts that outnumbered cars in the villages. Weirdly, Romanian geese that, unlike any other geese I'd encountered on the trip, seemed to have a personal issue with the engine pitch of a BMW R1200GS.
Some distance off I'd spot them pricking up their ears, or whatever it is that geese prick up, and start to spread their wings- an avian version of "you wanna piece of me, huh?" By the time I drew alongside them, they would be in a right old flap, squawking and hissing and chasing me down the road. Once at a safe distance, I would pull over and watch other people on motorbikes pass by. Not a peep. Bizarre.
Sons Of Thunder p173  Mike Carter

[Biggles]

I approached a bend. Fast. I couldn't see the exit. It was tight, and as I leaned into it, it got tighter and tighter. I couldn't touch the brakes. On a road like this, with loose shale on the surface, and potholes everywhere, it could have been fatal, my wheels falling away from under me. This is one of the most common causes of death on a motorbike: misjudging your speed coming into a bend.
I started to drift across the road, unable to keep in my lane. The bend showed no signs of opening up, smoothing out. On the far side of the road were spruce trees. 
I looked at them. There was one in particular, thicker than the rest. I stared at it. The bike started to straighten, move upright. I headed for the tree. I went to hit the brakes. I was going to crash, no doubt, but any reduction in speed might make all the difference. The whole thing had taken perhaps less than a couple of seconds, but somehow time was stretched.
I remembered Kevin's words. Have faith. Look where you want to go. The bike will follow. It has to.
I ripped my eyes from the spruce tree. It was an act of will. And I turned my head to look at the bend once more. The bike dipped again, leaned in. I think I left the road at one stage, crossing the line on the far side, riding over needles and cones, trees flashing past. But I couldn't be sure, because all I was looking at was the road ahead, the bend opening up, my right hand twisting back the throttle, me whooping like a lunatic.
Sons Of Thunder p176  Mike Carter

[Biggles]

"The fine will be eight million lei," the police officer was saying to me.
"But that's... that's about 200 euros," I replied, which a quick calculation told me was roughly the average Romanian wage for a month. I could feel my bottom lip trembling.
"You should not go so fast. This road very dangerous," he said.
"I'm sorry."
"No good. You under arrest. You get in car and we go to bank." I felt like the victim of a cashpoint mugging.
He ordered me to leave my bike by the side of the road and get into the passenger seat of the police car. Then we drove away heading for God knows where. After about 10 minutes, down a quiet country lane, the officer pulled over into a lay-by. Unless there was an ATM in one of the adjacent oak trees, which I was pretty certain there was not, I was guessing that this wasn't the end of the journey.
The officer switched off the ignition, slowly, deliberately, and turned to me, his gun nestling against his thigh.
"Okay. For you, for lei cash, there is 20 per cent discount," he said.
"Discount?"
"Yes. Consider it gesture of goodwill from the kind Romanian people."
As he was talking, he was fishing around in his wallet. He pulled out photographs. My prejudices started to resurface. I imagined they might be of bloodstained cells, or show corpses lying face down besides a lay-by, this lay-by.
"This my sister, she live London," he said, showing me a picture of a smiling woman toasting the camera with a large glass of red wine.
"You married?"
"No."
"I give you her address. She is very nice. Make good wife."
"I'm not looking for a wife," I said to him.
"You no like my sister?" he said.
"It's not that, it's..."
"How about this one?" He'd pulled another picture out. "She live Coventry."
"She seems very nice, too... Look, I'm flattered you think I might be good enough for your sisters, but I'm not interested!"
"Thirty percent."
"What?"
"Discount. Thirty per cent, as goodwill and because you think sisters very nice."
I laughed.
"What would the discount be if I married one of your sisters?" I said.
The policeman suddenly looked at me solemnly, gravely.
"Mister. You try bribe Romanian police officer? Is very serious offence."
Sons Of Thunder p177-8  Mike Carter

[Biggles]

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."
"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5,000-foot straightaway one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest diminishing-radius loop turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.
Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix or low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.
Sons Of Thunder p183-4 Hunter S. Thompson

[Biggles]

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear. No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.
On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4,000 rpm...
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4,000 to 6,000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
Sons Of Thunder p187  Hunter S. Thompson

[Biggles]

No one told me to retard the spark. True enough, it was in the manual, but I had been unable to read that attentively. It had no plot, no characters. So my punishment was this: when I jumped on the kick starter, it backfired and more or less threw me off the bike. I was limping all through the first week from vicious blowbacks. I later learned it was a classic way to get a spiral fracture. I tried jumping lightly on the kick starter and, unfairly, it would blast back as viciously as with a sharp kick. Eventually it started, and sitting on it, I felt the torque tilt the bike under me. I was afraid to take my hands off the handlebars. My wife lowered the helmet onto my head; I compared it to the barber's basin Don Quixote had worn into battle, the Helmet of Mambrino.
Sons Of Thunder p201 Thomas McGuane