Motorcycle Explorer February 2015 Issue 4 | Page 56

W
e stopped for photos at Austria’s abandoned border post. Travelling through Europe
has become a simple process since the Schengen Agreement of 1995. This freedom of
movement is one of few tangible advantages to the whole European Union mess. Sam will never
know the trauma that it was to ride across Europe with stops at every border and a constant
need to keep buying and changing local currencies. Actually that’s not true, because we still had
Turkey to get through, and they remain outside the EU despite a keenness to join. When you see
the state of the Greek economy, maybe they should count their blessings.
Our chosen route to Romania via Austria, rather than cutting straight across Slovenia, was at my
request, mostly for reasons of nostalgia. I’d previously ridden this celebrated motorcycling road
along Austria’s southern border on the way to the 2005 EuroLambretta rally. That edition of the
rally was held in a biker campsite called Route 69. I remembered the site having massive beer
barrels converted into cabins and imagined it could be fun for us to rent them for the night. I
tried to put to the back of my mind that these were, in reality, simply oddly-shaped sheds in
which drunken bikers would have spent the subsequent eight years puking and farting, and
were presently being baked in 30-degree heat