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