Europe

At 5am on Friday morning the alarm woke me. I had packed and prepared the 1959 Velocette the day before so I was dressed and had the bike outside ready with its saddle bags within twenty minutes.
It's only a 10-minute ride to the ferry and when I arrived I thought it was the first one but they waved me on board and saw that there were already quite a few bikes from the historic motorcycle club of Malta on board. 15 of us were travelling together to join a group of Italians for a rally around Ragusa area.
The crossing was smooth and uneventful but when we arrived in Sicily the weather was very hot and after about 40 minutes riding on beautiful country roads we started to climb a hill that was over 8 km long and my engine started to get very hot. It was my fault. I was labouring it and not thinking about what I was doing. It got so hot that I had to stop and there was a strange rattle from the engine and let it cool and even after 10 minutes I burned my finger when I pressed the button on the carburettor to put more fuel in but it started and it sounded fine. So I continued this time in a lower gear and the ignition retarded a little bit. I had no further problems. We stopped for lunch. It's a nice little restaurant that was next to a castle so I had to look around the castle and its grounds before we set off for another hour to the hotel.
The hotel is magnificent four-star and quite cheap for 2 days and several meals. Friday night we were the guests of the Ragusa motorcycle club for another massive meal. We went in a 1968 fiat bus. It was great fun.
Saturday we went for a ride for about an hour and a half and ended up in the free municipal consortium of Syracuse we had to walk around and into two beautiful churches. Their whole town is a UNESCO Heritage site. The churches were very nice. Then we went for a meal of about five courses. I've eaten so much on this trip. I think I'll explode. I knew that rain was forecast for 4:00 and of course the meal went on and on. So by the time we came out it was already raining and the rain turned into thunder and lightning and really heavy. So we just waited and sheltered somewhere until the worst of it was over and then we put on our waterproof clothing and I watched my friend Martin scooping hailstones out of his sidecar before we began the journey home.
Some of the riders didn't have waterproof clothing so they found some refuse sacks and cut the holes and wore them. I had waterproof over trousers and jacket but I still got damp.
By the time we got to the hotel. It was sunny
All in all a good day.

Tomorrow we have breakfast. We ride around a bit. We have lunch. We ride around a bit more and then we go towards the ferry back to MaltaЧитать далее