From: noemi@maui.cs.ucla.edu (Noemi Berry)
Subject: The European Adventure: Day 2
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 09:41:19 GMT

This is the next installment in the tale of my 9-day
motorcycle adventure in Europe during the summer of '92.
I apologize for its length and hope that your news/mail
software will allow you to skip over it easily if it is
of no interest to you.

noemi
*--------------------------------------------------------*

9/30/92
The European Adventure
Day 2: The Day of the Yellow Light

    Yahweh looked upon his people and was displeased.  They had grown 
    debaucherous and slothful in their ways.  Legions were found to be in
    partnership with Daemons.  Their true faith must be tested. And thus 
    Yahweh conceived what would be the first of many challenges to test the 
    worthiness of his people - The test of the lights.  
                                    -Demonthenese

Friday, August 28
Heidelberg, Germany

I forced myself to sleep in as late as I could, since I was so filled
with nervous energy I could have stayed awake the whole week I had
the rented FT500.  I had barely rested the night before, staying
awake long into the night, obsessed with my atlas of Germany.  Today
I planned to do a day trip, and spend the night in Heidelberg again.

The map indicated there was an area west of Heidelberg (Pfaelzer Wald?)
with roads that were not riddled with towns along the way.  I suited up
and got going around 11am, but not before beaching the bike between the
very low curb between my parking spot and the street.  Lesson #1 in
managing a too-tall bike: back out as parallel as possible to the curb.

Getting out of Heidelberg was really frustrating: the lights seem to
have the same maximum-annoyance sensor frequently found in printers
and copier machines.  I counted: 8 out of 10 lights I was caught at
the yellow, finding myself at the head of the line for a hot, long wait.
Some lights had no cross traffic, and I missed California's on-demand
traffic signals, even though their sensors don't always pick up
motorcycles.  The 2 out of 10 times I didn't get caught by the yellow
was when I realized, hey, I'm not on my 300cc Kawi!  Brrrrrrr-AW, goodbye
red light.  It took me 15 minutes to go maybe two kilometers in light
traffic.  What a way to start a ride!  I couldn't believe my bad luck
with yellow lights.

And now, my first gas station.  My stupid phrase book does not
tell you how to say "leaded" in German!  So what is leaded and
unleaded?!  There were four choices of pump.  After 5 minutes
of guessing words and looking them up in German, I was able to
eliminate "benzin" (gas) and "super".  "blei" was the only word
that appeared on two pumps, in the incarnations "bleifrei" and
"verbleit,".  The only word I could think of that would appear
on more than one pump, besides benzin and super, was lead.  So
blei must mean lead.  Now down to "ver" and "frei", I guessed
that "frei" means "free", looked up "free" in the phrasebook's
sparse English-to-German dictionary -- bingo!  "Bleifrei" means
unleaded.

I'd never have guessed that basic principles of set theory
would be useful at a German gas station.

FINALLY, I'm ready to go!  My patience is thin...I had left over half
an hour ago and was barely 5km out of Heidelberg.  That's when the FT
chose to give me starting practice.  Damn!  I tried the touch method of
operating the starter button, as per the mechanic's instructions, which
turned it over, but it didn't start the bike.  Crank, die.  Crank, die. 
After trying for about 5 minutes, giving the battery breaks, another
rider came over to help.  He didn't speak any English, so I couldn't
explain what little I knew about the starter motor.  I watched helplessly
as he did the normal, but in this case unnecessary, inspection of the
fuel petcock, choke and kill switch.  Finally he aggressively grabbed
the throttle and starter button, and the FT fired up.  He looked at me
dubiously with an expression on his face that said "bimbo" in German
and I was sheepishly on my way.  Curse my lack of German!

A hot and frustrating 2-hour ride with many, many more yellow lights
finally brought me to my destination of small mountains.  Finally, some
twisties, please!  I did find some nice roads that went through some
pleasant towns, but nothing terribly technical or challenging.  It was
very pretty and very green, and when I came upon a narrow wooded road
that was mostly deserted and fairly straight with some bends, I pushed my
speed limits a little and tested out my FT.  What a BLAST!  I liked this
bike more and more.  It took the bumps without nary a wallow, and when I
found a large dirt parking lot to play in, the FT felt right at home (I
was told later that this bike has DP ancestry, and it really felt it).

I loved having my feet so much higher off the ground, since on my Kawi,
the wide, square cruiserish pegs makes ground clearance a precious
commodity.  I didn't test the FT's helping of clearance too hard,
but on one wide 180-degree turn, I did feel a minor ch-chh from the
right peg, politely letting me know its angled underside was riding
along the ground.  No bashing, no catching, no crashing.

My riding was actually rather awkward and stilted; I was nervous
about pushing it and didn't know the tires yet (they weren't the
newest, but were still well within acceptable).  I could feel
myself resisting leans, and in a push-right situation, my left hand
was haunted by survival instinct and also pushed to prevent the
the go-right part.  In fact, during the whole trip, my riding per se
never got relaxed or good; there were a few times when things felt like
they were coming together, but I just didn't have enough time to
familiarize myself with the bike or the surroundings well enough to
completely take command.  The FT is also a lot more capable than
my Kawi, many of whose limits I have reached and know well.  It let
me be a little lazier about changing gears, since the 500 single
willingly offers power in a wider RPM range.

This riding was pleasant, but where were the high mountain passes?!
I stopped at what had all the markings of a posing spot, and asked
a sponsor-sticker-encrusted Suzuki sportbike rider to show me where
to go.  He pointed to a few roads that he said were "great" -- but I'd
just been on those.   And they didn't hold a candle to California roads. 
I asked, well what do you do after those?  With a grin, he responded,
"I ride them again!"

I just couldn't believe that this area of 10-20km bendy stretches was
the best riding in Germany.  But looking at the map, this area was
the best one around.  Where is all the good riding?!

I had lunch at what appeared to me a "meeting place" for motorcyclists. 
There were other riders there, and I got the feeling I would be free to
join them if I liked, but as always, I couldn't talk to any of them.
In general, I drew a lot of attention when I went in places, no matter
how unobtrusive I tried to be.  I was always embarrassed by not being
able to speak the language or read the menu and having to carefully
xamine  coins for their value.  I got the feeling a lot of people felt
sorry for me, since I frequently had a slightly frazzled and frightened
air about me.

I did all the roads in the area, never getting into a swing and stopping
often to check my map, and then headed toward the Autobahns to crank back
to Heidelberg.  I was frustrated with the lack of long roads to play on,
but told myself that it was good to have a day of easy riding to get used
to the bike.

Unfortunately, the lack of relative directions got me: I had to switch
autobahns twice in order to get back, but as usual, when there's an exit,
you have to know the name of the town where the road is going.  Dammit, I
just want Autobahn 661 SOUTH!!  I don't KNOW what town it goes to or what
autobahn it goes to and the town that autobahn goes to!  A series of wrong
guesses had me back in Heidelberg two hours late to meet Bill and a friend
for dinner.  I was VERY frustrated by the time I got back to Heidelberg,
and when I got caught at every yellow light in the city again (don't they
synchronize the lights here?!), I firmly decided to get the heck OUT of
the cities.  No WAY was I going to Nuremberg tomorrow as originally
planned, since the riding looked even worse there than around here.

We had a spaghetti dinner at The Pub in Heidelberg, though it took me
hours to settle down from the many hours of blood-boiling annoyance.
We went out The Cave, a place in the center of Heidelberg (where
EinBahnStrasse points to :-)) that has a smoky downstairs area with
a bartender/deejay, a small dance floor and a grotto motif.  We hung
out there for the evening, danced and people-watched, until I begged
off since the smoke was so heavy my eyes were swelling shut.  A lightning
storm gave us occasional lit-up glimpses of the city as we walked back,
and an occasional welcome sprinkle.  But please don't rain tomorrow!

Later that night, Bill took me for a ride on the Autobahn in his
BMW 320i -- that was GREAT!  I was thrilled to be the intimidator
instead of the intimidatee.  The rev limiter hindered any further
acceleration after 215kph ( > 130mph), but we could book along at
this speed completely legal!  I loved it.  Then Bill took me for a
short twisty ride where we were treated to a power slide and an ABS
demo.  It was lots of fun -- even if cars lean the wrong way in turns.

We ended up staying up very late talking when we got back, and I stayed
up even later looking over maps, including a giant one of Switzerland
that I had bought that day.  This map had some evil-looking squiggles on
it, and I began to formulate a plan to head south.  I didn't get to sleep
any earlier than 4am that night, setting the stage for a very lazy, but
enjoyable, tomorrow.

End of Day 2.

noemi
*---------------------------------------------------------------------*
noemi@cs.ucla.edu (for now)     				KotSBL
DoD #443  						'82 KZ 305 CSR
							(hang in there!)
	Next Motorcycle (NM) countdown: $3000 and/or one job
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