Gurriers (68 page)

She exhaled sharply with a doubting snort, as she sorted out her keys, but she wore a shadow of a mothering type of smile when looked up at me.

“Merci monsieur, au revoir.”

“Merci madame, a nos returnez”

“S’il vous plais monsieur, ne returne jamais.” This time she treated me to a full smile.

“Looked as if you patched things up nicely with that old dragon, Shy Boy.”

“Not really, Gizz’.”

“She was showing you loads of choppers there, man; ye musta said somethin’ right!”

“I told her that four hours was loads of sleep for us and I’d see her when we come back. When she was smiling at me she was asking for us please never to come back.”

“Hope she’s here next year when we do come back.”

“Me too.”

When the lads were describing us as ambassadors of our country they used the expressions: loudest, wildest, drunkest and fastest (the last one being aimed solely at Vinno, Gizzard and Leo). I felt that this morning we had added cheekiest to our accolades.

We went back to the same McDonalds for breakfast that morning where the same overly-worked manager was on duty again. He needn’t have been so concerned - what with it being breakfast and all we only had two beers each on this visit to his premises and again, all joints were respectfully smoked outside.

The lads were in great form. I was getting giddier by the minute as the food, beer and joints helped me through the hangover. Today I was going to get to the legendary Le Mans race track!

The next leg of our journey was a 50 mile stretch to Alencon, about half way from where we were to Le Mans. There was a distinctive café bar on the main street that the lads used as a rendezvous point each year. They affectionately called it the “goldfish bowl” because of its three huge circular windows.

The sky was darker and a bit more ominous today. The road was still dry but we expected to run into some showers. Those of us with old or damaged leathers threw on light leggings over them just in case. Leo called Mad Tom a wuss for putting his on and was reminded in a loud voice that there was nothing cool about wet balls.

This was ensued by laughs all round.

We halved the head starts in proportion to the distance and the 12 in our pack set off eight minutes after the slower group. The drive was even more enjoyable than the previous day’s for several reasons: we were closer to Le Mans where we would be staying that night; there were lots more bikes on the road all
laden down with camping gear as we were, the vast majority of which were all going to the same place as us; we were more at ease with the French roads than the previous day and we were confident that we were all going to make it in one piece.

Not far from Caen, our route met with the route of the English on their way from Calais. Almost instantly the volume of bikes on the road doubled. As with the French, most of the English had top of the range sports bikes that were much faster than our packs’ but also as with the French we were going fast enough on our working bikes for a lot of them and even too fast for some. We found ourselves merging with other packs - sometimes for miles - with lots of nods, waves and smiles all round.

A lot of the other bikes seemed nervous around us though, because of the speed we were going on our bikes, the gaps we were going for, the late braking and “on the limit” way of manoeuvring that we employed. Every bike that had been level with me on the straight bits, tailed off behind me on the next roundabout. I got past at least one bike that was in front of me at every roundabout also, often scaring the shite out of the pilot in the process. The best one though, was the two blades.

We came upon two identical blades - one English and one French - that would have been doing 100 mph, each glancing at the other occasionally for comparison or whatever. Shay was a few bike lengths ahead of myself, Dave on the Tenere and Seamus on the super four. We were three abreast with me in the middle. We were all driving pretty fast - in excess of 100 mph.

Shay had no problem swinging to his left, around and past the two blades. Dave lined himself up to follow Shay’s line and Seamus eased over to the right to get the other side. I could have eased off the throttle and followed either of them to the side but I didn’t. I calculated that I would just about make the gap in between the two blades and went for it.

I could see the two of them jump simultaneously as they realised that someone was coming between them. They eased apart a little to give me more space and then jumped again, as each realised there was another bike on the side. Then they touched their brakes and they were gone, leaving the bullying bastard
Paddys to carry on in their triple-decker formation.

A few miles further on I got a taste of my own medicine from an English blade – possibly the same one that I had startled. At that stage Dave and Seamus had both wrangled their way ahead of me through gaps in traffic. That left me at the back of our little four-bike pack. The others had dropped off a little due to the extra aggressive way that we had been driving. I could still see them in my mirrors, but there was a good stretch of clear road between them and me.

The blade used this stretch of road to accelerate up to silly speed in my blind spot behind me. The result was that I had about a quarter of a second before realising that there was something fast coming behind me and him passing me with about eight inches between us at something in the region of 140 mph. I jumped with the fright.

It must have been retribution for my previous antics.

My heart was busy fluttering itself back into the position it had been in before it tried to escape from my chest when a flicker of light got my attention. Then another in my other mirror followed by another one. Before I even realised that I knew the shape of the headlights, I knew that it was Vinno and the Gizzard, flashing their lights to make sure that I knew they were coming, and fast!

VA - VOOM

The blade was on one side, Firestorm on the other, each just as close as the other blade had been, but no fright here. Firstly, because I knew they were coming and secondly because these boys were long term full time professionals and not some amateur that happened to have a powerful engine under him.

“Did ye catch up with that English blade?” Gizzard just gave me a look that said silly boy and took a long swig from his “grand bier”.

Vinno felt obliged to answer. “You mean that straight line merchant that scared the shite out of ye?”

“How did you know that?”

“I saw the line he took from miles back – deliberately comin’ up on you in yer blind spoh. Anyhoo, it took us a few miles to
get up on him ‘cos it was a good stretch of road.”

“They’re all good stretches of road over here, man.”

Shay came from inside the goldfish bowl with two frothy “big beers” as the French called half litres and placed one on the table in front of Leo.

“First roundabout he came to, though bish bash bosh – get into our past. We both outbraked him to get level with him. He was all twitchy looking at me on his outside an’ we flung the bikes into a lean together. He tried to ease his way in further to put some distance between us and only then realised that the mad Gizz’ lad,” Little wave of acknowledgement from the Gizzard, “...was on his inside, literally under him. This scared the shite out of him, he didn’t know what to do. Wobbled his way through the roundabout and then eased off and left us to it, rightly put in his place. Go on in and get yourself a beer. I’m just about to spark up this joint.”

While I was at the bar I could hear bike after bike arriving, shortly followed by cheers and salutations. I felt great.

The area outside the goldfish bowl was little more than an extra wide footpath with four cheap plastic patio tables accompanied by 20 odd appropriately cheap plastic stackable chairs, but it was a great place to have a beer and a smoke on the way to Le Mans. The town was by-passed by the main road to Le Mans but many of the migrating bikes stopped there for a break before completing the last leg of the journey. Alencon was also a big biker town, with four big bike shops in a town smaller than Dun Laoghaire in Dublin, one of which was right behind the goldfish bowl. Also, as well as the steady flow of bikes on their way to Le Mans beeping and waving at us, there were a lot of local bikes more than willing to buzz up and down the road in front of us, rewarding our shouts and cheers with whatever stunts they had the ability and power to perform.

The locals in the cars also contributed to the atmosphere with beeps and waves and silly amounts of revs aimed at us and every truck that drove by gave us a blast from the air horn. We sat there soaking up the atmosphere as well as the sun - as the weather cleared and brightened - for quite a few beers, joints
and croque monsiers.

I began to feel nervous about the drive ahead when I was on my third beer and could feel the drunkeness begin to creep up on me. I didn’t feel comfortable with the notion of “on the edge” driving at top speed while drunk. I asked a few of the others when they planned to move for Le Mans without getting any definite answers. They had all settled down here, which was worrying. It was very hard to coordinate the departure of a large group from a pub once they got settled. Somebody always has half a pint in front of him and then somebody else decides to get a pint while he’s waiting and then everybody gets pints and the cycle goes on, usually until there are no more pints to be got. I decided to stop drinking after my next pint and do my bit to persuade the lads to leave as soon as possible. A plan was beginning to formulate in my head.

“Why don’t we get a hotel here and go to Le Mans tomorrow?”

“’Cos ye get as many nights as ye want on the campsite for yer entry fee. It’d be stupid to pay for a room when ye have a free option down the road.”

“A good bit down the road with a lot of high speed nonsense going on around us.”

“That’s what we fuckin’ came here for.”

“Not when we’re drunk though.”

“Ah don’t be worryin’.”

“Will we go soon if we’re going so?”

“Yeah, Yeah. Here, lads, Shy Boy’s gettin’ all worried abou’ drinkin’ an’ drivin’.”

“Buy him a pint.”

“Fuck sake, Shy Boy, ye jus’ have to lock yer arms an’ point yer good eye forward an’ ye’ll be grand!”

Despite all the smart arse comments I knew that my concerns had been heeded. Each one of them knew the risks involved in drinking too much and then driving.

When I got myself an orange juice half an hour later, my lead was followed by three of the more sensible among us. Paddy, Shay, and Gerry all got themselves non-alcoholic drinks next.
Twenty minutes later we were all ready for departure. It was decided to leave together this time and rendezvous in a huge underground car park in the Carrefour supermarket on the main street in Le Mans.

I told myself that I was going to take it easy on this leg, deciding to keep Gerry in my mirrors at all times - him being one of the more sober drivers. I knew the dangers of drinking and driving were threefold: a messed up sense of balance; lack of ability and a heightened desire for thrills. I could do nothing now about the first two, but I could apply discipline and avoid having the third one as an issue. This worked for me and whatever discipline the others applied to themselves also, because we all made the rendezvous in the surreal car park in one piece.

Car parks in general don’t tend to be surreal, but if you throw a couple of hundred partying bikers acting the maggot on their bikes into a dark confined space, all screaming and shouting in French amid overwhelming smells of tyre burns and tortured engines, not forgetting to add the effects of quite a lot of beer and smoke, the sense of being in a real car park fades somewhat into the distance.

The mechanical mayhem, of course, picked our spirits up even higher than the level they were at due to the whole pack making it. It was decided that we’d just get beers and a bit of food for that night and come back down tomorrow when we didn’t have all our camping gear with us and stock up properly.

The supermarket itself was gigantic - bigger than anything I’d ever seen in Ireland and it sold everything from clothes to car accessories to electronic goods.

We went straight to the alcohol section. The lane beside the alcohol was the soft drinks lane. There was a promotion for the new Pepsi Max drink in that lane. Unlike Ireland, where these promotions always had a lady in a white overcoat and hat dishing out the product, there was just a table, a lot of bottles of Pepsi Max and stacks of disposable plastic cups.

I was just finishing my little sample cup when I was unceremoniously shoved out of the way by Steve in a barge toward
the table. He had a bottle of cointreau in one hand and a bottle of Pernod in the other.

“Scuse me, boys, more free samples comin’ up.” Both bottles of alcohol were cracked open as a palpable wave of excitement spread through the group.

We were there for a good 15 minutes during which time both of these bottles were emptied, four more were relocated from the neighbouring aisle and we were joined by at least 20 French bikers who lavished many blessings upon us for having such a wonderful idea.

They were only too happy to carry on the session when Shay persuaded us that it was time to go before the shit hit the fan, reminding us also that we had tents to put up before it got dark, which gave us less than an hour, including time to queue up, get our tickets and then get to a good spot. I knocked back one more Pernod and Pepsi Max and followed him and others with a definite wobble in my step. Funnily enough, I was less worried now about drinking and driving than I had been earlier. I convinced myself that that was because we were in the town now with the track less than two slow miles away in the midst of thousands of like-minded revellers and not because the drink had a hold of me.