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Scene: My most absurd tour
Scene: My most absurd tour
My most absurd tour
How a family trip to Ireland’s dream beach becomes a near-fiasco for surfers. Not entirely innocent of this: two out of three enduros in a somewhat poor condition that had to be used as a means of travel.
09/30/2010
With our surfboards we paddle through the breakers in front of Rossnowlagh, a deserted beach in the north-west of Ireland. The water is cold, but we are comfortably warm, because surfing is our duty on earth. We have arrived at our destination and are in our element. No way was too far, too difficult, too crazy for us. And there are no roads, no buses, or trains to this dream beach, which is an absolute dream for surfers. If you want to go there, you have to run. Or ride an off-road motorcycle – our choice. Although enduros are actually not particularly suitable for transporting surfboards, and the way from Heilbronn to the Green Island is long.
In any case, this trip has the title “Chaos at its finest” earned. Review: In the Ardennes, after a stop for provisions, the Kickstarter says goodbye to my wife Mupi’s Yamaha TT 350 with a metallic ring on the asphalt. So Mupi can regularly use the for the remaining 4000 kilometers of our tour “manual” Enjoy jump-start help from their male crew. One hundred kilometers before Le Havre and one hour before the ferry departs, the next problem: Peng – the chain broke on my TT 600! At least I can recover the chain and start filing a link bolt with ridiculous zeal, which is simply impossible without the right tools.
In order to reach the ship on time, it is clear that an improvised towing service is now required. And one with full steam ahead. So we tie up the luggage with shoelaces and belts in order to convert the luggage straps as a tow rope. Now imagine how a train of crazy Germans with three hopelessly overloaded machines is towing away at a remarkable speed of 120 km / h, the whole thing under the metronomic back and forth of the load. Or rather: under the “Sails” in the gusts of wind, because surfboards fixed upright are not really streamlined, as we have to find out. In any case, the drivers behind us prefer to keep a respectful distance. While driving on the motorway is extremely tricky, towing through Le Havre’s city center is a real tightrope act. Mupi loses traction at a red light and puts down her fully loaded mill in the middle lane of a three-lane road, the rest of the chaotic troop almost follow suit with the knotted carts while the honking traffic squeezes past.
Finally we make it to the ferry, and the line of cars is even there. We can’t believe it and we perform an ecstatic dance of joy. Finally a welcome change in the timetable. Really welcome? “The ferry is broken. She no longer drives at all. Not today and not this week”, a downcast driver explains to us. So we first set up our tents on the only green space of a few square meters in the ferry ghetto. There follows a night of queuing and negotiating with the totally overwhelmed crew from the ferry company. I make it clear to the agent that we are stuck with one and a half broken motorcycles and that we need Saturday for repairs first. He does his best and books us on a ferry from Roscoff at the far end of Brittany to Rosslare in Ireland.
The next day at a Yamaha dealer, I fished out various chain segments, sunk upside down in the garbage can there, and had a couple of suitable links flexed out of them in the workshop. Happy about that “Organ donation” I’ll start repairs later at the ferry parking lot.
Unfortunately, the chain is too long with a single complete link, a single inner link would have been enough. But I didn’t have one of those exposed, and the shop is already asleep for the weekend. A flex is nowhere to be found, and with the blunt hand file we have no chance against the chain pins. When I was worried about whether we could still surf at all, I got an idea: We put a small branch across the leftover piece of chain so that its side is on the asphalt, and we tie the construction to my brother’s Africa Twin Guma, so that I – standing on the chain – can surf the asphalt. After just 30 meters, the side of the chain glows blue and the bolt heads are ground off. Done! Now the chain can be mended, and it is said that there are only 300 kilometers to go to the alternative ferry.
However, after certain navigation problems, which are by no means unusual for us, there are well over 500 kilometers on the clock when we reach the ferry port in Roscoff – at the last minute, of course. As it turned out, Mupi had been forgotten when changing the booking. And Guma’s twelve-year-old son Finn has no ID with him. “You cannot get on the ferry without papers”, makes the fat-bodied boss of the ferry agency clear, who takes a position behind the counter. “We’re all going to get on that ferry”, If I express myself unmistakably, then we saddle up. The corpulent wire brush holds us some regulations and wants to call the border police.
In the meantime we send Mupi on the ship to have a foot in the door. Hardly on deck, the ramp is pulled up. Mupi without tickets, money and passport. This might or might not be fun on Irish entry. With a scream, Mupi tells the team to lower the gate again. Meanwhile, a discussion rages between the steamed noodle with the hair on his teeth, the border guard and me. The good one from the ferry company has found some paragraph according to which if we try to enter without a passport, we will have to pay 2500 euros per person at Irish customs and then be sent back on the same ferry. “No problem, we pay”, we say, and the woman slowly begins to despair, especially since the ramp is now being lowered again for us. During her nagging, she lets in briefly “OK” fall, which applied to a different matter, but no matter: for us a formal invitation to misunderstanding. With all the charm I can fake, I push my way between the ferrywoman and the border guards and shook their hands with both hands.
With so much exuberant thanks, she can’t row back, and we roll onto the ramp with a feeling as if we’ve conquered the shit. From here on everything went like clockwork, and hardly a drop of rain fell during two weeks of vacation in Ireland. We still got wet every day, but only while surfing on waves that belonged to us alone.
Yoma Pogo, his wife Mupi, his brother Guma and his son Finn are people to whom boards of all kinds mean the world. Boards without wheels, boards with wheels, but also motorcycles. No wonder that Yoma also indulges his passion professionally and runs a skateboard shop near Heilbronn. Because Yoma and his family are bon vivants, they don’t hesitate and take the respective boards with them to their areas of use on the motorcycle…
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