Category Archives: On the road

Villach friends at the Beer Festival

Part of the fun of this trip is the fact we don’t really have a definite plan of where we are going. We have a rough idea, with a need for me to be in Paris on the 26th of August, but where we stay each night is partly up to random chance.

By random chance we ended up in Villach in Austria. We had intended on making it to Lubijubijubi (I can never remember how to say or spell that place) in Slovenia, but a local festival was making it hard to find a place to stay. By midday we had decided to go elsewhere, and sent out some couchsurfing requests to places this side of the Austrian/Slovenian border. Within an hour we had a friendly “Yes” from a lovely woman called Nikki. Just by chance, Villach was also having a local festival… a beer festival. The gods be praised!

Nikki invited us to join her and some friends for some pre-festival drink, and then out to the festival with them. The festival was manic. There were thousands of people filling the streets, most dressed in traditional costume. We picked a beer tent that had a huge pig on a spit roasting outside it (it was awesome… hmmm, meat), opposite another tent playing some traditional Austrian music (which sounded like it was out of the 60s). We all got into the swing of things though by drinking beer an eating pork. Nom nom nom.

MEAT!

The festival was huge though. It took us forever to walk all the way through the streets jam-packed full of (drunken) people. They had fair-ground rides, and not just the small piddly ones either. I lost Tristan at one stage but found a bar selling more beer (like it was hard to find), where I waited with a young couple who I’d met earlier that night, talking about random drunken crap and giving them my sagely advice. Eventually Tris turned up with a grin on his face, and we all then found a taxi back to where we were staying. It was close to 4pm by the time we got to sleep.

I couldn’t wait to get off the bike after our second day of riding. We travelled over 500kms on long boring motorways. Our aim is to get as far East as quickly as possible, but with 25k to go before our destination of the day, Besacon, I just wanted to get off the bike. In fact when we stopped, I got my helmet off as quickly as possible and threw my jacket on the ground. We had both had enough, especially after fairly much no sleep the night before.

Our plan for an early night went out the window when we took our host our for a meal, and then she suggested a walk up to the citadel. The view was great but the walk back to her house was draining. We didn’t get to bed until 1AM, which wasn’t good considering we had to get up at 6:30AM. Whimper.

The next day was a mad dash to Chur in Switzerland (nothing exciting happened), and then bout 580kms from there to where we are now; Villach in Austria.

Well, we were sort of off. The torrential rain in the morning wasn’t an encouraging start to our trip but by the time we actually hit the road it had cleared up.

I had promised myself I wouldn’t take as much gear with me this time. As I hefted my chokka full bag onto the back of my bike, forced closed my full top box and wiggled the jam packed tank bag into place, I wish I had remembered that promise. Dick.

We only had a short ride down to Folkestone then a few hours on the other side to a place called Amien for our first day. I remembered riding being exhilirating, and it definitely was that and more. The “more” bit was remembering how squashed one’s balls get, how sore one’s arse gets and how tiring it can all be. But we made it fine and were greeted by the friendly face of Anna our first Couchsurfing host. She set the standards pretty high as she plied us with beer and put on a BBQ. We hung out with her, her boyfriend and housemates for the night, with our incredibly poor ability to speak French not being much of a hinderance. Tris tries to speak the local lingo better than I do and has been a inspiration.

The highlight of day one was Tris learning how to remove a bottle cap from beer bottle using a lighter. I’m glad I was there to witness him finally becoming a real man.

The train ride over