And so on and so forth, to Seville (lunch at El Riconcillo, a bar founded in 1640) and Jerez de la Frontera (sherry capital of Spain), and then the next day to Gibraltar (like writing, less fun in the doing than in the having done) and Málaga, where we dropped off the bikes and spent three days simmering down—swimming in the Mediterranean in the morning, in beer then sleep in the midday, and sangria in the evening.

That first morning in the Mediterranean I stood up to my neck, sighing with the cold until I got used to it. And then sighing for a few minutes more, with relief.

One of those afternoons, Tom and I spent more than two hours at a bar next to our hotel, tediously and laboriously reconstructing the week’s trip, by the day. You would think it would not be difficult, remembering the morning roads and the lunch stops and the afternoon roads and the hotels and the sites seen and the dinners had.

But the days blurred together like months and years and decades of our lives. We had to piece the days together.

By now we’ve probably done enough foolish adventuring, Tom and I. When we were young, we were building our characters by the mile, finding our limits, discovering our curiosity and listening to ourselves think out loud, occasionally startled to notice a Third Guy coming to life.

Now, our trips bear us back into those trips of our youth—force us to be with those young men, again. Those young men who could not have imagined the life they were about to live, because they did not understand their own capacity. Those young men who now look up at the two of us with many emotions—complicated, but best summed up by awe.

In the hours between our rides, we walk and talk and eat and drink, lost in a kind of perpetual, overarching astonishment that we have lived long enough to have amassed lives that still matter to us and that still matter to one another and that are not over yet. “Your dad would be proud of you,” Tom told me casually one afternoon in Barcelona. And then he revised it to say “amazed,” is more like it.

No more amazed than me.

We awoke the next morning with a farcical amount of ground to cover: about a 170 KM ride from Alméria to Granada and the stupid Alhambra visit, before booming off to Cordoba, another 160 KM across the desert to in the murderous late-afternoon Spanish sun.

In the face of this pre-programmed foolishment, our neuro-divergent Third Guy had himself a little meltdown. I was trying to fortify myself with the hotel breakfast. Tom was rushing me through it, the quicker to get on the road. This kind of conflict is standard and normal, and resolved a dozen times a day by verbal compromise and mental muttering. But that morning, as we lashed our bags to our bikes, Tom toddled off in search of a fucking baseball cap he’d left last night at Casa Puga—or was it that other bar we went to after, what was the name of it?

At this, I exploded, shouting angry words I don’t remember, in front of many alarmed or amused people outside our hotel, and stormed off theatrically down an alley, in phony search of the hat myself. 

We were already beginning to laugh about it at the gas station on the way out of town, and the rest was washed into oblivion by the next hour’s ride along the coast, where the Mediterranean and the sky above it, shrouded in a horizon-blurring mist, gave us the impression we were riding alongside one great deep blue dream: riding alongside inner space.

And now, I will twist the throttle and sprint through the rest of this one mid-trip day, with the understanding that every day was like this—is like this, on a rigorously scheduled motorcycle trip:

A highway climb over the mountains and onto the plain to Granada.

A hot entry to Granada and steep, winding ascent to The Alhambra, which overlooks the city. Motorcycle jackets are okay at speed, but the moment you settle into city traffic you will do anything to get moving again.

Lunch at a restaurant there—gazpacho is served cold because midday in Spain is served hot—and into our idiotic hustle through The Alhambra, a Moorish palace and fortress begun in 1200 AD, which is beautiful but too big to see and comprehend in an hour. I call it, “awesome bushes and trees and stuff.”

Needing to make Cordoba, we tore off into a desert hairdryer, ripping on a fast road through a beautiful but lonely and eventually tedious landscape of one trillion olive trees. (Or were they dates?) We passed about four castles on the way, like they were car dealerships.

We stopped in a small town a little more than halfway through, for a breather and a beer. In that bar, we were both reminded vividly of many late afternoon riding stops in Midwestern country saloons—a happy pack of local day drinkers and a good-natured, wisecracking woman behind the bar. (From what  international casting agency do these daytime barkeepers come?) On a TV, a weatherman explained in great detail that everywhere across Spain it was hot and sunny. His map showed 30 suns. That seemed about right.

On to Cordoba, where our GPS machines inexplicably melted down just like the Third Guy had that morning, causing us 45 hot and enraging minutes of circling blocks and cutting through alleys in search of our hotel.

Which, when we finally found it, became a comprehensive oasis. The clerk became our concierge, arranging, as we gobbled cold beers at the counter, a free parking spot for the bikes, a fast-turnaround laundry service and even a switched hotel accommodation in Málaga, where we wanted to spend our last three nights in a better spot than the airport-adjacent place our numb-nuts tour director had assigned.

Suddenly feeling settled and sane, we half-strutted down to Cordoba’s Great Mosque. Along the way, we discovered that Spain was playing France in an important semifinal football match in the European Cup. Many of the restaurants were packed with Cordovians eagerly watching it—some of them, proprietors of other places, which they’d closed for the occasion. “Viva Espania!” went the shout when Spain tied the game—a prelude to another echoing citywide exultation when Spain took what turned out to be the decisive lead.

We wound up having dinner at a fancy courtyard place at about 10:00 and returning to the hotel by midnight to rest for another massive, three-city endeavor tomorrow.

The next morning, the fucking hat turned up. It had been in Tom’s duffel all along.

Tom and I have considered the proportion of untroubled pleasure on any given motorcycle journey. We agree that it’s rarely over 50% of the time that you’re not hot or cold or wet, hungry or thirsty or having to piss, sore, bored—or wishing you were bored, because you’re worried about low fuel or a mechanical problem. (Like a cooling fan blowing hot air onto your leg, only partially resolved by an improvised “heat shield.”)

But it’s the way that the relief and joy comes that compensates.

On the road to Alméria, we were blasting through a hot-gusty desert furnace when we suddenly felt a little cool on our faces and down into our open jackets. We knew we must be getting close to the sea. Mustn’t we? Half a mile later we tore up another hill, swung around the thousandth curve of the day and suddenly The Whole Mediterranean Sea sat below us, and the blue sky straight ahead.

A few motorcycle-exclusive moments like that—there would be several on this trip—make up for a lot of discomfort, hassle and worry: on the day, and in the memory.

***

In Alméria, we ate and drank like Hemingway at Casa Puga in Alméria, a 1906 bar and restaurant, the happiness of whose room cannot be described except to say we were there on a Monday night and it was jammed and roaring with locals in the spirit of a payday. We exulted at finally, for the first time since Barcelona, feeling we had found Spanish Life, and the time to enjoy it. (Already we had arrived at the Santa Barbara castle in Alicante 10 minutes too late to catch the tram to the top; later, we would walk hot and huffily through Alhambra in Grenada—a place too vast and beautiful to reward Idiots in a Hurry with even a false sense of comprehension. But at Casa Puga, we were in the right place at the right time, in the right frame of mind.)

Tomorrow would be another story. A few, in fact.