Motorcycle Misadventures | Around the Adriatic

June 2, 10:30 pm
Hotel Villa Malpensa, Milan, Italy

June 1-2, 10:30 pm
Hotel Villa Malpensa, Milan, Italy

Ciao baby!

I arrived a few hours ago in Milan (Malpensa Airport) on a very easy flight on the oh-so-accommodating British Airways and in just under 12 hours, too. Here is a chronicle of the trip.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1: SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL

Air travel just gets easier and more enjoyable. First I stopped by the new spa just inside the international terminal at SFO. They’ll give you a pedicure, manicure, foot massage, neck/back massage, and several other treatments for quite reasonable prices. I opted for the foot massage – heck, I had two hours before my flight so what better way to spend twenty bucks and a half hour? (Had I known about the pedicure I wouldn’t have bothered doing my own yesterday.)

That done, how then to pass another hour? Solution: float down to Il Fornaio at the end of the terminal to enjoy a glass of Echelon Pinot Noir in peace and quiet. (I chose the Echelon because it promised rich berry overtones...or was it undertones? And it delivered. Stronger than your average Pinot, and yum.)

At Il Fornaio a long walnut bar separates you from the bustle and so it’s just you and the opera music and the bartender with the sexy accent and the very complicated beard pattern and an expansive view of the international terminal parking lot with the freeway faintly buzzing far beyond. So that's how the trip began so very nicely and I’d only parted with about thirty dollars — no, I forgot to mention the 10 pack of San Francisco keychains to give as small mementos — so let’s say forty bucks and I was on the plane.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1: BRITISH AIRWAYS TO LONDON HEATHROW

BA's seats aren't as spacious as they used to be but I scored an aisle seat (subscribe to their service and check in online) next to two thin, undemanding women in the center and window places. (The two big guys behind us were releived that nobody was in the middle seat in a nearly full flight, nobody else could have fit, truly.) Next to me was Teresa, a young woman anthropologist on her way to Barcelona for a week’s relaxation and then on to Kyrgyzstan way up in the mountains to commune with the shepherds and monitor cattle grazing patterns and collect material for a global warming proof-piece. She works for a non-profit organization funded by the Christensen Fund and normally studies textiles (she explained the process of making felt) but is branching out.

Teresa gets to travel a lot for her job and a couple of her favorite places are Central America and Mexico’s Copper Canyon, which makes me even more antsy to take a motorcycle ride there along the Ruta Maya. Soon! Soon! But then she said that her second favorite place was the American Southwest and that’s been on my list, too. (I've had the guidebook Motorcycle Journeys through the Southwest United States on my bookshelf for about a year.)

We talked a lot about solo women travel and customs and malaria pills and the weird things that you just have to go with when you’re traveling to very foreign places, like, she said, don’t you just hate it when they do something like bash a goat over the head with a rock and serve you the eyeballs because you’re the guest of honor?

Yeah...I just hate that.

THURSDAY, JUNE 2: LONDON HEATHROW TERMINAL 1

Speaking of food, the offerings at London Heathrow sure have improved since the decade or so since I’d last had a layover there. Among possibly fifty shops and perhaps thirty or more restaurants in Terminal 1 -- grills and bars and cafes and a health food smoothie place (and the Burger King), I chose a seafood restaurant smack in the middle of the floor all decked out in glass displaying a fine array of fresh salmon, shellfish, squid. Thirty bucks (or was it Euros?) later I had happily consumed a sample platter and a nice glass of dry French white wine.

I wiled away some more time with a salad at the health food place, sitting at the bar so I could watch the schedule and gate announcements. It takes up to 15 minutes to walk from one end to the other of Terminal 1 and I was sure, with my luck, I'd be 15 minutes away with 10 minutes to departure. (And of course they announce the gate just barely in time.)

I sat next to a Russian man around 70, I guessed, dressed in a Tahitian shirt with a surfboard print and a white cap patterned with black polka dots. He immediately started a flirtation -- I had nothing to do with it, I swear, and anyhow what the heck, a twenty-minute flirt in an airport never hurt anybody. But wow, was he a charmer!

"You have a radiance, you are alive, I can see that you are a special woman," he told me. As well as, "Ah, your coat has brushed my leg, I will always have the feeling of it." (Well, maybe it was a Russian expression...)

He said he was an author and a poet and that he'd been in San Francisco in the days and had hung out with Ginsberg and the crowd, "really," he said, as my face betrayed a hint of doubtfulness. In fact he was on his way now to Dublin for a reading of poetry. He said "I'm famous," and to look up his book, Don't Die Before You're Dead on the Internet later, "you'll see." It was a lovely twenty minutes and gate was then announced and indeed it was a 15 minute walk so I said goodbye. "Ah...I will always, always remember you..."

So today I googled him and indeed, Yevgeny (Eugene) Yevtushenko is a real author and quite celebated, too. A 1995 review at Zima Station has this to say about him:

"A literary superstar in Russia since his teens, he attracts stadium crowds of up to 30,000 for his poetry readings. He moonlights as an actor, director, screenwriter and political activist. And his passion for life includes filling significant parts of it in the company of women and good wine. Appropriately for someone whose achievements seem larger than life, he is, at six feet, three inches, larger than most people around him, dresses in an eclectic, electric manner that would do the lead singer of a rock band proud, and, with his famous piercing blue eyes undimmed at age 61, has just as much stage presence."

The review was written 10 years ago. I can say that at age 71 Yevgeny Yevtushenkohe is still quite a charasmatic character with piercing blue eyes and that his passion for life still does include filling significant parts of his life in the company of women and good wine.

THURSDAY, JUNE 2: BRITISH AIRWAYS TO MILAN MALPENSA

On the London to Milan route I scored a window seat in order to gawk at the landscape — the English Channel, then a city that might have been Brussels, then through the rich farm country of northwestern Germany and eastern France (a patchwork of crops in small plots) and beyond the majestic Swiss Alps rising first in brown jagged spikes from the plains and then higher and higher and covered in snow and with their own little weather systems, clouds clinging to crevices spooned out and crumbling around the edges, some formations chopped out vertically like a giant axe had been taken to the earth, others smooth and graceful. I saw a ski village far below that maybe I visited when I lived in Lyon years ago on the weekend when I would go to the French Alps or in the warm months to the higher Swiss mountains and even Mt Blanc to ski on the lovely icy glacier.

The captain announces that we are approaching the Po Valley and fasten your seatbelts because we will land in 20 minutes and then there is the graceful curving snake of the Po River that empties out into the Adriatic Sea with which I will become intimately familiar during this next five weeks.

THURSDAY, JUNE 2: HOTEL VILLA MALPENSA

At the elegant Hotel Villa Malpensa just a 60 second shuttle ride from the airport to an ancient villa-turned-hotel and I have an aperitif of Campari and tonic with lemon, a wireless connection to the Internet, dinner of Petrale Sole with fresh asparagus accompanied by a Pinot Grigio-Chardonnay blend followed by a chocolate cake confection spiced with pepper and then a sweet digestif and then some talk about motorcycling with the manager and a porter – men, they use their arms, whoosh whoosh they muscle the bike right and left with their biceps and women, whoosh whoosh we finesse the curves with our curves, our hips. We all laugh, no no, they say, si si, I say, and they are clearly shy and so then it’s bed, sleep, blissful sleep until the 9am wakeup call.

FRIDAY, JUNE 3: MILAN TO MANDELLO DEL LARIO

June 3-5, 2005
Mandello del Lario

It always begins with food... a quick look at the Breva and then it is time for dinner.

See the photo gallery >

June 5-10, 2005
Venice to Brindisi