just about 24 hours have passed and I totally arrived in the traveling mood.. even faster than I expected. So I got up early and was waiting nearly an hour for the bike shop to open. When it finally did, the guy told me the mechanic will show up at 3.30 PM, but when I was waiting outside, I met another dude that told me to check out Assisi (yes, the place where holy Franz comes from ;) So I decided to pay the place a visit to kill the 6 hours until the mechanic would show up and it turned out to be awesome!
Assisi is a city on a hill overlooked by a mountain fortress. Ancient military installations always got my interest, as I just find it extremely fascinating picturing all the wars that have been fought in these places. While churches don't really touch me, forts definitively do! Assisi is similar to Gruyere in Switzerland, except it doesn't feater a H.R. Giger museum. But they have the remnants of holy Francis of Assisi burried deeply in a church. Well.. I still like Giger waaay more, but as I heard of the holy Francis more than twenty years ago, it was pretty cool to pay him finally a visit. If anybody wonders what happened to him, well.. there he is. Assisi itself is though much more awesome than Gruyere. Just stay on the upper level and avoid the souvenir shops and the hordes of tourists swarming on the lower levels. There's at least half a dozen of churches but as I'm not very religous, I didn't feel bad to not enter them all. Bloody wars that have been fought in the past really get to me while prayer is just boring :P ..here in Italy almost every city has some old town and is full of history. I past dozens of places that are built heavily fortified on a hill and by the look of them, I don't wonder why there still there.
So I was walking around in this ancient city on top of a hill and imagined how all this must have been looke a thousand years ago. I'm happy I met this italien girl a few days ago that speaks German, studies history and looks just gorgeous. And best of all: she invited me to Rome, so I will be able to catch up with what happened here the last 2000 years! :)
On the way back I stopped in Perugia and had lunch on the plaza principal before I got back to the main mission of today: fixing my bike.
So I got there half an hour early and after a cappuccino and some more waiting the machanic finally showed up. His English was pretty good but the only issue was that they were on a tight schedule and had plenty of bikes to fix. I told him that I suspect the temperature sensor or the thermostate, hoping it's not the pump or the piston seal. The guy let the bike run hot and checked the fluid that was dropping out.. then after a few moments of reflecting, he opened the tap of the cooling container and showed it to me. It was pretty worn out and the sealing looked bad. He ran around muttering "tapa.. tapa.. tapa.." and then he picked up a tap from a dissasembled bike and screwed it on my bike. Ta-daa.. the dripping stopped. I couldn't believe it! that was a really simply solution to a problem I thought might cost me a couple of hundreds Euros. This guy is my hero!! not only he's a bad ass dirt bike rider, no he must have pure oil for blood! Despite they were super busy, they changed the cooling fluid (as I poured it a couple of times drinking water) and had a very good look at it in the end. So now I feel the bike is just fine (as it always was, until I tempered with that tap). I even wonder if it was me messing this up when I tried to fill up the cooling fluid in Switzerland, but then he probably would have felt that tap screwed on incorrectly. So I want to believe it was not me but just an old tap that now has been replaced. I bought some chain lube and a emergency tube-inflation-kit (as the tire is not tubeless after all) and for the work of changing the cooling fluid and checking through my bike he just charged 35 Euro. I wanted to give him a good tip, but he refused. This man undoubtly has incredibly good Karma and I finally know, why I looked so long to find this place and waited all this time to talk to the right person! Only thing that's still not done is my back tyre. Turns out its 17" and there are no Off-Road tires for that size. Even worse.. it's a very uncommon size and hard to find at all (so much for "I will do this later during the trip when it's cheaper" :P ..darn.. I should know by now! Well.. I will try in Bari and then in every major city I come along. It's just.. I should have done it back home when it would have been easier. But anyway.. it should last a bit longer and at least I know now what's the deal about my back tire.
When leaving the shop (it was around 5 pm), I drove to a library and got finally a map of Italy. I opened it and picked a camping ground on a lake about 100km away. I activated the navigation app on my phone and after downloading the maps of Italy, it worked pretty well. So I got to the place where I'm staying now. I'm just incredibly happy and thrilled that my adventure is going so well! :) along the way I hit some rain (I developed an eye for it) and even if sometimes you can just drive through, I prefered to go with option B: make everything water proof (including the driver). This just takes 10 minutes and then I could proably drive through a car wash without getting a drop of water inside ;) It then wasn't too bad actually and after driving over a hill or two I got the sun shining in my face again. It's just awesome when you see the clouds opening up a few kilometers ahead and then you reach that zone. So I drove down to the lake and along the shoreline until I found a camping. Pitched my tent, had some beers, did some artist things and finished it all with a yoga head stand. Now I'm going wrap myself in my sleeping bag and mark the road that I drove and the one that I will take tomorrow on my way down to Bari.
Life is just awesome and this trip is fucking EPIC!!! Love you all and hope you have as much fun as I do! :D
Assisi is a city on a hill overlooked by a mountain fortress. Ancient military installations always got my interest, as I just find it extremely fascinating picturing all the wars that have been fought in these places. While churches don't really touch me, forts definitively do! Assisi is similar to Gruyere in Switzerland, except it doesn't feater a H.R. Giger museum. But they have the remnants of holy Francis of Assisi burried deeply in a church. Well.. I still like Giger waaay more, but as I heard of the holy Francis more than twenty years ago, it was pretty cool to pay him finally a visit. If anybody wonders what happened to him, well.. there he is. Assisi itself is though much more awesome than Gruyere. Just stay on the upper level and avoid the souvenir shops and the hordes of tourists swarming on the lower levels. There's at least half a dozen of churches but as I'm not very religous, I didn't feel bad to not enter them all. Bloody wars that have been fought in the past really get to me while prayer is just boring :P ..here in Italy almost every city has some old town and is full of history. I past dozens of places that are built heavily fortified on a hill and by the look of them, I don't wonder why there still there.
So I was walking around in this ancient city on top of a hill and imagined how all this must have been looke a thousand years ago. I'm happy I met this italien girl a few days ago that speaks German, studies history and looks just gorgeous. And best of all: she invited me to Rome, so I will be able to catch up with what happened here the last 2000 years! :)
On the way back I stopped in Perugia and had lunch on the plaza principal before I got back to the main mission of today: fixing my bike.
So I got there half an hour early and after a cappuccino and some more waiting the machanic finally showed up. His English was pretty good but the only issue was that they were on a tight schedule and had plenty of bikes to fix. I told him that I suspect the temperature sensor or the thermostate, hoping it's not the pump or the piston seal. The guy let the bike run hot and checked the fluid that was dropping out.. then after a few moments of reflecting, he opened the tap of the cooling container and showed it to me. It was pretty worn out and the sealing looked bad. He ran around muttering "tapa.. tapa.. tapa.." and then he picked up a tap from a dissasembled bike and screwed it on my bike. Ta-daa.. the dripping stopped. I couldn't believe it! that was a really simply solution to a problem I thought might cost me a couple of hundreds Euros. This guy is my hero!! not only he's a bad ass dirt bike rider, no he must have pure oil for blood! Despite they were super busy, they changed the cooling fluid (as I poured it a couple of times drinking water) and had a very good look at it in the end. So now I feel the bike is just fine (as it always was, until I tempered with that tap). I even wonder if it was me messing this up when I tried to fill up the cooling fluid in Switzerland, but then he probably would have felt that tap screwed on incorrectly. So I want to believe it was not me but just an old tap that now has been replaced. I bought some chain lube and a emergency tube-inflation-kit (as the tire is not tubeless after all) and for the work of changing the cooling fluid and checking through my bike he just charged 35 Euro. I wanted to give him a good tip, but he refused. This man undoubtly has incredibly good Karma and I finally know, why I looked so long to find this place and waited all this time to talk to the right person! Only thing that's still not done is my back tyre. Turns out its 17" and there are no Off-Road tires for that size. Even worse.. it's a very uncommon size and hard to find at all (so much for "I will do this later during the trip when it's cheaper" :P ..darn.. I should know by now! Well.. I will try in Bari and then in every major city I come along. It's just.. I should have done it back home when it would have been easier. But anyway.. it should last a bit longer and at least I know now what's the deal about my back tire.
When leaving the shop (it was around 5 pm), I drove to a library and got finally a map of Italy. I opened it and picked a camping ground on a lake about 100km away. I activated the navigation app on my phone and after downloading the maps of Italy, it worked pretty well. So I got to the place where I'm staying now. I'm just incredibly happy and thrilled that my adventure is going so well! :) along the way I hit some rain (I developed an eye for it) and even if sometimes you can just drive through, I prefered to go with option B: make everything water proof (including the driver). This just takes 10 minutes and then I could proably drive through a car wash without getting a drop of water inside ;) It then wasn't too bad actually and after driving over a hill or two I got the sun shining in my face again. It's just awesome when you see the clouds opening up a few kilometers ahead and then you reach that zone. So I drove down to the lake and along the shoreline until I found a camping. Pitched my tent, had some beers, did some artist things and finished it all with a yoga head stand. Now I'm going wrap myself in my sleeping bag and mark the road that I drove and the one that I will take tomorrow on my way down to Bari.
Life is just awesome and this trip is fucking EPIC!!! Love you all and hope you have as much fun as I do! :D
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