It’s touring time again, and this year Steve and Mark are heading across Europe on their bikes (and not a Fiat 500!). Mark has no idea where he’s going and plans to just follow Steve who has planned the route in fine detail.
We met up at a petrol station near the motorway at 7:30am, and Steve had already had a disaster, the heat had made his knee slider fall off, and also when he’d put his leathers on, he found out that he may have put on some weight since last year as the press stud holding them together pinged across the room!
On our way we made good time on the boring trip to Folkstone to catch the Chunnel. We stopped for fuel and a guy came over to check out our bikes. He said that he used to be a biker until he met his wife and had kids and had to have something more sensible. We looked over and he was driving a million pound Carrera GT; the 600hp monster that killed Paul Walker and was also crashed by Rowan Atkinson and Lewis Hamilton’s dad. He was on his way to Goodward Festival of Speed to race on the track. Despite him loving our bikes, he didn’t want to swap though.
We stopped for a drink at the services and while we were there a crazy guy was walking around the shop playing shit music out of his blue tooth speaker telling people that "music was coming from his pocket". He was still there when we left, it's probably what he does everyday.
We arrived at the port/station early in hope of catching the earlier train, but in true British style the trains were delayed. So we were left stood in the baking heat in our Leathers for an hour until we eventually got underway.
Once in France we hit the road and immediately headed for Belgium but opted to stop for lunch on the way. Not having ridden the bikes for a while was taking its toll on our wrists, and needed wrist strength akin to a lonely teenage boy.
We stopped at a French sandwich shop and ordered a small sandwich each. Instead we got a 2 foot long buagette which mostly fell on the floor.
We arrived in Mons and checked into our hotel. It was nice but the room was strangely layed out. It was a small place but still there were 2 stools, a table and two chairs. We felt that it would have been improved if the owners could just stop buying furniture for 5 mins and gave us somewhere to actually stand instead. Even the toilet had a chair in it so that someone could sit and watch you have a shit!
We'd arrived during the England vs Belgium 3rd place game of the world Cup. As the game was unimportant we opted to not wear our football shirts and went to the local town Square. Good move. There were about a million Belgium people running around celebrating their win like they'd won the cup, massive big screens showed the game, lots of temporary bars, it was crazy.
We put on German accents and ordered some beer and watched them celebrate for several hours. To be fair it's probably the most exciting thing that's happened in Belgium in 20 years.
Later we moved to a nice looking bar and Steve called over the waitress and asked if they served beer. She gave a strange look and then opened up the menu which had 5 pages of every beer you can imagine. We stayed there for a while.
After a nice steak we headed back to the hotel for a nightcap and somehow ended up drinking girly pink beer. Best call it a night
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