Arrival in Hamburg

That was a first rainy trip - and cozy in my Patagonia undies.

 

I am at the right spot. 6pm sharp the terminal opened and I received my loading info. But it really took until 20:40 until we could drive onto the waggons and then finally move into our compartments in the passenger waggon. Walter and his wife had the more luxorious option, so, we had to split up.

The journey begins

Guess what: I have the woodburner stove going. While the sky in Garding, Hamburg and Lörrach and in Mâcon is grey with clouds of rain, I received a very nice message from the Intur Orange Hotel in Benicàssim, Spain: 

Hola Dilg Peter,

Muchas gracias por reservar en el Hotel Intur Orange. Estamos encantados de que vengas a pasar unos días con nosotros. Días que, te prometemos, jamá vas a olvidar, porque nuestras experiencias dejan huella.

Prepárate para un viaje único con los detalles de tu reserva e información que te dejamos a continuación.

Nos vemos pronto. ¡Nosotros ya te estamos esperando con los brazos abiertos!

or in English: 

Hello Dilg Peter,

Thank you very much for booking at Hotel Intur Orange. We are delighted that you are coming to spend a few days with us. Days that, we promise promise you, you will never forget, because our experiences leave their mark. leave their mark.
Get ready for a unique trip with the details of your reservation and the information information that we leave you below.
See you soon, we are already waiting for you with open arms! open arms!

That bloody makes my day. That is what I am aiming for. Friendly people with open hearts, and a nice ride under a sunny blue sky, with temperatures around 25 to 30 degrees. Easy riding. I'm coming, folks, I'm coming.

More Packing

The special feature of the original BMW cases is their expandability. You flip a lever inside the case and almost twice the amount fits inside.

I had to use this feature because I have to take some bulky things. My tip: if you are like me five to six days on the road, then take a pair of comfortable shoes. I don't want to walk around with the heavy biker boots and thick textile motorcycle suit all vacation. So a few comfortable shoes have to go, and they take up a lot of space. Also a warm fleece jacket must come along, after all it is already quite cold in October. And also a warm pair of pants must be on board. So I took my Trelobite Kevlar jeans with protectors. In Spain it is still very warm, there I can certainly still use the jeans well.

If you travel alone like I do, a selfie stick is quite helpful for taking pictures. I find this self-absorption of the selfie culture questionable, but the family is certainly happy about a few pictures in which not only the Black Betty and landscapes are on it, but also I, as part of a social structure.

A selfie stick also needs power, so make sure the battery is still working, that you've packed spare batteries, and that the stick pairs easily with your cell phone.

On the subject of Bluetooth pairing, since I carry two cell phones (an iPhone and a Samsung A22 5G), I wanted to make sure that both devices had already been paired with the SC1 Sena radio in my Schuberth C4 Pro helmet. With the Samsung, I followed the SC1's instruction manual. According to that, you have to press the plus and minus buttons at the same time for more than 10 seconds, then supposedly the cell phone can find the SC1 Bluetooth device. This exact procedure does not work at all.

I then searched YouTube for a corresponding tutorial and found one. It says that you have to hold the plus button for a few seconds after switching on the SC1 (briefly holding the plus and minus button) to enter the system configuration, and then press "+" again for the first configuration menu item, which is "Pairing Bluetooth devices". This process worked immediately. Now if the iPhone should fail me, I only need to connect the SC1 to the Samsung.

You don't want to have all this stress while you're on the road and probably already stressed anyway because one of the phones failed or was stolen.

By the way: I suggest that you pack the loading cables that you tested and used already at home. That way you make sure that you can rely on the material you take with you.

Packing

Today I started packing my most important pieces of luggage: the topcase and the tank bag. In the middle of my packing, my friend Omar called, still reeling from a Corona infection, but in good spirits again. "Just pack some cable ties and duct tape! That's the universal stuff for emergencies." And that's what I did. I went straight to the DIY store and bought two sizes of cable ties and a roll of duct tape and packed them. Thanks Omar! I hope that I won't need that stuff though.

In both the tank bag and the top case I tucked in a plug for the 12V socket and a cable for the phones. IMPORTANT: never leave the plug in the socket, these things still draw power even when the bike is switched off. The next morning you will find the battery empty. The steering lock won't respond, and even if it does, the starter won't even "click". I just had it. I was lucky: the battery was probably so old that it was completely dead after this carelessness. Now I've installed a brand new battery, which I hope is a bit more robust.

Another tip from Omar: take the spare key with you (the grey plastic emergency key). Thanks for that too, Omar, I did. But where to put the car licence, the passport and the spare key, so that they can't get stolen or lost? I found a kind of pouch in my inventory that you can tie around your waist with a click fastener. I' ll put an FFP2 mask in it, and some cash, just in case. Maybe I'll put my Samsung mobile phone in there too. 

In the tank bag is my toilet bag, medication, my blood pressure monitor (unfortunately, as a high-risk patient, I need three measurements a day), spare batteries for the blood pressure monitor and the BMW key and the LED emergency lights, a pair of light sweatpants for the stay on the car train, and cables and a power supply unit for my mobile phones and my Apple Watch, for the hotel and the train.

There is one thing you should not forget: some noise protection earplugs. The Sonic Shop has some very good ones, especially for motorbike noise, and I've made very positive experiences with them. The earplugs are very soft and comfortable to wear. By default, they come with a medium sound attenuation (green inner part), but there are different inserts (white and red inner part), which you can easily change for medium and heavy noise, depending on the bike you ride. Despite the plugs, you can still hear the helmet radio well, and the ambient noise can still come through well, for example the siren of an ambulance that is still far away. All sounds are only muffled in the dB value. 

I also packed an original BMW charger in the top case, in case the battery should run out against all expectations. The charger is simply plugged into the BMW's 12V socket, so you don't have to uncover the battery in the bike first to connect the terminals to the poles. However, you can also do this if you really want to. Then I packed two LED headlamps for emergencies at night and a charger for AA and AAA accus. My headlamps have different modes: bright focused light, bright wide-beam light, continuous red light, flashing red light. I then have another, not a stand-alone LED lamp with a white continuous light and a white flashing light, for example for securing an accident site. In case of an accident, I also packed two emergency first-aid kits. Also a multifunctional tool, spare halogen bulbs for the headlight, a bit set and a small bit screwdriver. The top case also holds my rain suit, a dry bonnet for changing, special spray for cleaning the visor and a soft cleaning cloth. And then there's my laptop and a laptop power supply.

Preparations Part 2

Monday, 10.10.2022. It is pouring with rain now, but this morning was quite nice. Sunny and cold, the right time to wash and shine my motorcycle and make her look nice for the trip. 

Then the wind came, and rain, but I covered her up, sheltered her from the inclemencies of the weather, right next to Susan's orphaned White Swan, poor thing, in our carport, where the firewood for the winter is stored as well, our emergency reserve for the effects of the energy crisis. We don't need anything like firewood in Spain. It is nice and warm there right now, 25 degrees during the day, 17 degrees in the morning. Perfect for a good glas of Tempranillo in the evening, watching the sun go down. The cost of living is low, the sea is close and invites you for a swim, and in the beach bar you can have a delicious cocktail. 

In preparation for any eventuality, today I rummaged through the documents for my GS, much to my good fortune, because I found the green insurance card for traveling abroad, the user manual, and a type description supplementary to the motor vehicle registration certificate, which you need for abroad.

I also got the Corona vaccination certificate from the doctor and loaded it into the Corona apps. It now says that I have been successfully vaccinated for the 4th time, in black and white. The Spain Travel Health (SpTH) app is no longer active. The government refrains from further checks of this kind.

The weather app forecasts a rain-free day for Thursday, my travel day to Hamburg Altona for the loading of my Black Betty into the motorail train to Lörrach. I leave myself to be surprised. Every expectation is a potential trap. Tomorrow I will still impregnate my motorcycle suit.

 

Preparations Part 1

 Last week I delivered my last Leadership Development Seminar before the trip. Yesterday I went to the doctor to get my 4th Corona vaccination and flu shot. After continuing to write my novel today, I am now ready to slowly move from the compulsory programme of my life into the more detailed planning of my trip. I'm probably a bit obsessive, so I love thinking through the steps of my journey as best I can. I can always change the whole thing.

I use spreadsheets for my planning. Here's a screenshot of the 5 stages, with hotel information, kilometre details and calculated journey time. In case of rain, I choose the shorter driving times via the motorways, in nice weather I consider driving on the national roads of France. 

I booked all the hotels via booking.com. With the booking app, I have all the data in one place. I then loaded the bookings into my Apple Wallet, a service that booking.com also offers. This is also how I

entered the overnight stays in my calendar, so that I now have several possibilities to look up the destination addresses. In case both my mobile phones fail (or the power socket on the bike), I printed out the partial routes from Google Maps. A bit crazy, isn't it? Well, it gives me the necessary peace of mind for the trip. After all, I'm riding alone and have no one to talk to on my way.

Autumn Blues

 

The Leadership Development Programme of the last three days has left an impression on those around me, traces in sensitivity, moments of awakening in some participants, as if a person blinks into the sun to let the light flow in small, tolerable doses into the sleepy, orphaned soul, to awaken it ruefully and with an uncertain touch.

After the third day of the seminar, Susanne and I were still driving home, a 14-hour drive, lost in confusing road closures and detours around Hamburg's Elbtunnel for a good hour, finally arriving home shortly after two in the morning.

At noon today, I went to get my fourth Corona vaccination and a flu shot, which my doctor had recommended for me at my age and also because I am considered a high-risk patient due to the stroke I had a few years ago, before I start my journey to Spain.

To my relief, my ticket for the motorail train to Lörrach has finally arrived, so all the preparations are now being made. By now it's nine o'clock in the evening and I'm dead tired, probably still from the exertion of the last few days, the long journey home, although it was very a pleasant one, and the vaccinations that have put my body's immune system into a state of war.

I just came back from late night shopping, the fridge was empty after a week's absence. I bought fruit and vegetables, meat for Jan-Eycke, cheese for us and some discounted fish for me. There are also a few bottles of Tempranillo Reserva on the shelf again, for €2.95 a bottle, a wine with a wonderfully earthy taste, each sip a sensual compensation for the painfully large time gap, separating us from our house in Spain.

Outside, in the forbidding darkness of night, a cold wind atomises the fat rain into a chilly mist that seeps under my skin through all the cracks in my clothes and seems to suck the life force out of me. All my senses feel existentially threatened and long for open fires and hibernation. Images flicker through my mind like silent bats, images of unkempt, weed-strewn graves with wet gravestones slowly sinking crookedly into the cold, damp earth, uncared for, witnesses to a bizarre cult of the dead, a burdensome imposition on those left behind. 

Thursday I will tear myself away from the ghosts in my head, or I take them with me on the ride through a rainy Europe. I am alone with them and the restrained, confident roar of the boxer engine, hours and hours on the road on the shrivelled folds of the earth, like an amoeba in a petri dish, wandering around in random twitches without leaving any traces. The difference between a longing and fulfilment is not the belief in the possibility of the beautiful, but the doing in all the sober ugliness of the present moment. Without expectation of any wonderful beauty, humbly and yet with one' s head held high, facing the forces of unpredictable arbitrariness, appreciating life, enjoying it, in every moment.