Europe by Vincent
Never one to sit still, Alice loaded his Vincent and set out for his latest adventure, which he shares with us here…
Late summer, a misty damp morning in Slovenia. A country road leading into the nearby town; early morning traffic as people head in to work. I am sitting in a bus stop lay-by next to my buddy – 'Melvin' – with whom I have travelled around western Europe the last three months. Melvin has his back wheel out, which is nowhere to be seen: a man has just driven off with it. Some gesticulation and broken English was involved, whereby I puffed and pointed to my useless bicycle pump; he had then called someone on his mobile, and after a short conversation he said "ten minutes" and departed with the wheel. I hoped the phone conversation was something along the lines of, "can I come and use your compressor and blow up this guy's tyre?" but it also occurred to me that he may have said: "You know that wheel you've been looking for the last ten years for your Vincent? Got one…"
Two years earlier I had made the decision to go |to the 2019 Vincent Owners Club International Rally, a once-every-four-years event somewhere in the Vincent world. Melvin had taken on the challenge as readily as myself, and we did many thousands of miles together shaking down various items such as luggage arrangements, electrical systems (now 12V, and including indicators) and chasing down a couple of existing deficiencies, such as loose exhaust valve guides. The wife was less enthused, declaring after a 500 mile test run, "too fast and too much bumpbump". I took this as a decisive expression that she did not want to spend several months on the back of a 1952 Rapide going around Europe, and so she stayed home.
The VOC International was split between one week in the Ardennes Mountains, in south-east Belgium, and one week in the Austrian Alps. At both places, the Rally was based in a hotel, where daily forays are made to enjoy the delights of the local highways and byways. Trips are typically arranged over breakfast with whoever you might find yourself sharing a table (and maybe a sore head from the previous night's revelries) and we covered several hundred miles in each area. It was great to finally meet people one only knew through the club magazine, and many more I did not. Stories of Vincents down the decades sloshed around the tables, and the parking area provided a feast of ideas to improve, or embellish, one's own beast. Stand back from a row of post-war Vincent Twins, and they can all look pretty much the same (except the D's with their fibreglass fandangos) but get up close and no two bikes are the same. The Vincent fraternity is never shy to modify, and – dare I admit such heresy –
improve on Philip Vincent and Phil Irving's masterpiece, and the results are usually a delight.
After Austria, we travelled over the Alps to northern Italy, and then swung west towards Switzerland. A typical day comprised a sleepy start outside a rural pensionne, a watchful eye run over Melvin, then a good kick and a gentle warm up on the centre-stand, getting the blood flowing through us both. A spray of lube on the rear chain as it ambled around the sprockets during the warm-up in neutral, and then slide out the gate, trying not to wake the whole village up. We got into the habit of early starts, slipping out at six or 6.30, sun just coming up, and then twenty or thirty miles to settle into the day. Summer mornings in the mountains are the best: cool air, bright sky, no traffic – except beware the sleepy farmer on his vintage tractor staggering down the street heading out to his fields. Over a beer the night before, poring over the map, I had usually picked a way ahead, and Melvin was generally happy with my choice. We did have occasion to 'go the wrong way' – usually a side road that runs straight ahead off a hairpin – but I soon learned that there were no wrong ways to go, as when you don't know where you are going you can't get lost! This actually provided a crucial rule I made with myself at the start: if you realise that you are missing your turning do not conduct some dodgy manoeuvre to get across the road and get it right again, but go serenely onwards and find a decent – and safe – way to go back, if you want, or just keep going onwards. Crossing the US on a '65 Panhead the most dangerous moment had occurred when swerving to get into a lane for a turnoff I was in the process of missing. I do my best to learn from my mistakes.
That early morning run is the pleasant warm-up to the day; then comes a coffee stop – often leavened by casual conversation with an intersected local – and then off on what is usually the best run of the day: our blood is warmed and flowing, recharged with coffee, oil and fuel, the way before us lifted from the map and filed in the head, and the anticipation, and the expectation, of yet one more special day on the road. Later, the heat comes on, the stops become more frequent, the coffee turns to beer, and as the sun falls from the sky the hunt for a new bed for the night begins. We only had one night out by the side of the road, and that was in north west Spain after the kick-start broke and the only sensible course was to find a mountainside to camp on so we could roll-start in the morning. Bumpstarting a Vincent twin with full touring gear is not the easiest thing to do. On that occasion the VOC world-wide network kicked in and a friend in the UK had a kick-start – taken from his own motorcycle – sent by DHL to arrive in Asturias two days later.
From Switzerland we went to Paris, to the famous Montlhery banked track, where Vincent, Velocette and many other legendary makes from the past had broken world records in years gone by. At the
annual Café Racer Festival, a circuit of the track by about fifty Vincents was arranged to honour the passing of Patrick Godet, a giant of the Vincent world. Melvin was a little out of place in the company of perhaps the finest collection of Vincents ever seen, being a machine that has never been restored, only repaired and politely described as ‘well used’. We visited two of his former owners in the UK, one who owned him in 1960 – sold the bike to put a deposit on the house he still lives in – and another, at the end, who had built the engine back in 1968 that Melvin still runs on today. I did attempt to make a Warranty Claim on that occasion, as one of his 'gofast' mods (needle bearings on the camshafts) had failed us in southern Italy – but that was fun that was still to come.
From Paris we turned south: up over the Pyrenees, turning west and running along the fabulous mountain ranges of the Picos de Europa. We were heading south for Portugal and Malaga, but the kick-start event changed the plans. Turning back east, we found our way back along the Pyrenees to
Barcelona, by way of Andorra, and spent a pleasant week in a village with friends on the Costa Brava waiting for a wee spring for the gear-change that I foolishly left out of my spares kit. Ferry rides then took us to Sardinia, Corsica, back to Sardinia, and down to Sicily. This gave us some wonderful rides, and proved the extraordinary versatility of the big Vincent twin: the ability to handle Corsican mountain goat tracks alongside brand-new Spanish Motorways, fast open country roads interrupted by ancient towns with a maze of narrow one-way streets. We met a couple on a Hayabusa at a gas station in Corsica, loaded to the gunnels, the man rubbing his wrists and cursing the potholed, twisty mountain roads. For Melvin and me it was the most fabulous of jaunts. Living every day with one another, absolutely relying on one another, is the way to really get to know your motorcycle, and it you. There is a symbiosis that is essential if the journey is to succeed by any measure: there will be problems (Melvin is 68 and I am no spring chook!) but these are all part of the daily flow of intimacy, something that does not exist outside of this arrangement. There is man (or woman) and machine. They are separate things most of the time. But when you and that machine ride together you are something else, an entity that otherwise is non-existent.
As I waited for the wheel, reflected on what had gone before, and had a brief panic attack that the wheel might have gone forever, Melvin sat on his stand completely unconcerned. Ten minutes later, and our saviour indeed returned, tyre inflated to a pleasant 32 psi, and off he drove with a nod and my thanks. Ten more minutes and the wheel was back in and tools packed away, tyre levers cable-tied back to the crash-bar. Another example of the versatility of the Vincent is the ease with which wheels come out, and go back. We were still six thousand miles – and another six weeks – away from the end of our adventure. And neither of us had the slightest doubt that we would not reach that end together.