Читать книгу No One Said It Would Be Easy - Des Molloy - Страница 21

14

Gestation

“Oh, we seem to have forgotten it!”

“We don’t need to go at the moment, thanks.”

“I thought you were going to pack it!”

However, like their coastal counterparts they had decided on a demographic deemed suitable for their establishment and toilet-less motorcyclists weren’t on the list. They were inflexible and not even pleading constipation was going to change their mind.

This meant free-camping in the forest itself, and that could have been ok. All good things must come to an end is a pretty obvious homily. It is often attributed to Chaucer but understood by all of us. Some prepare for it better than others. The ‘Summer of 76’ had set records and seemed to go on forever. However, lurking in the greenery of the New Forest was the trigger for change. The forces of yin and yang came into play immediately we had found a suitably remote and discreet place to establish a camp … although camping seems to allude to some sort of temporary shelter, like a tent. For some reason we either didn’t have one, or my optimism and confidence in the wonderful weather of the time persuaded the others that under the stars would be great. So it rained and it rained. The trees seemed pretty dense and initially we thought they might give us shelter but once the foliage got saturated, so did we. Not wise enough to cut and run, we toughed it out lying under the trees, all but floating away in the deluge. Steph still asserts that she nearly drowned. The night seemed endless. As a testament to resilience, this was right up there with anything I had been through. We became half-submerged islands in a lake of ground-water. The saving grace was that it wasn’t cold. It stopped raining in the morning but being under the sodden tree canopy it continued to fall on us for quite some time before we wised up.

Quite clearly we survived to ineptly live many other days, but Steph often proclaims that it was a close-run thing. She only just gave me the benefit of the doubt that this was a one-off, and life with me wouldn’t be a series of near-disasters and escapades of dubious viability. The wonders of youthful love and lust saved the day, and preparations continued.

As well as the obvious physical bike preparation to be done, there were paperwork hoops to be jumped through. The dream of riding a motorbike across the world is often scuttled at the first hurdle … the right to do it. Because each country has their own regime of import duties, taxes, levies etc., it means that the value of the said