Chapter 10 - The only sound was the muffled crump off our exhausts.

We were heading west to Barcelona, to check an old school friend out and thought we'd go the scenic route via Florence and Pisa, then along the bay of Genoa keeping the green wobbly stuff on our left. We had two days to get there, we could have done it in a day but we didn't have to, so we took it easy.

The garage opposite 'manse iceheart' helped us check our tyre pressures. We gassed up and set off. Florence for luncheon don't you know, just a short blast to the sunflower and lace capital of Italy. It was only a short blast down the road.

We parked up, scored lunch and then mooched around the market bathed in sunshine and as warm as you like, we each purchased the token prezzie for loved ones, stuffed into meagre luggage and then hot footed it to Pisa. The weather couldn't have been more different than yesterday, it was gloriously hot and bright and bode well for rubber burning later in the day.

Pisa seemed like a small town, remarkable only for the epicentre of tourist activity that was the landmark church and skewed tower. In the flesh the lean is remarkable, somehow it doesn't look real on postcards, but apparentley another coupla degrees of dangle and the whole lot would topple over. The architect had built his house upon the sand an it had sunk and skewed to one side. Over the years remedial work had been undertaken but to no avail, consequently it was too dangerous to get in and up it.

The whole structure was clothed in an exoskeleton of steel, whilst the latest efforts to arrest the slow downfall of the tower were ongoing.

It was boiling hot, we ate ice creams and waved grinning African immigrants away like bothersome flies with their fools gold and tawdry timepieces. They were persistant but not a groat passed between us. Time to go, we had been a bit lax on the mileage front, time to travel.

In a show of pouissance and cred, slipping the clutch and feeding the revs in, the rear hoop failed to grip and momentarily tried to overtake the front. Starfishing in a frozen moment of dread, the rear Bridgestone finally hooked up and the bike tried to fling me over the highside. I hung on and it righted itself, my heart reduced it's jackhammer beat and fear sweat bathed my torso, luckily I got away with not dumping myself and machine bang in the middle of the street thronged with tourists and hawkers. My wrists ached like mad but I stared straight ahead insouciantly, nipping into line behind Phil and Fast, onward to La Spezia.
We hit the coast and turned right heading back north on the major motorway artery, hugging the coastline, skirting the Gulf of Genoa as it arced up and over into France.

This length of blacktop was truly fantastic, the whole afternoon was a series of shallow curves, long straights, tunnels and bridges, in brilliant sunshine and hot weather for hundreds of miles.

The only sound was the muffled crump of our exhausts as they bounced gobbets of bludgeoning sound off the tunnel walls like syncopated howitzers, the susurration of the Bridgestones as they lightly kissed the tarmac, the windblast as we ripped through the air, and my breathing seeming to come from the centre of my head, (weird effect, probably due to ear plugs).