The Final Ride Home
After reliving my youth in Venice I drop off the bike in Ljubljana before flying home with a heavy heart.
Last year (2024) I headed alone to the land of opera, gelato, pizza and the Mafia. Join me for my adventures.
In last week’s episode Truffles, Tiny States, and Tax-Free Shades I tasted truffles in the medieval town of Gubbio, encountered latter-day Robin Hoods in San Marino and rode to the Adriatic Coast as my road trip neared its end.
Venice
I pootled north along the coast road from Rimini smelling as though I’d been in a perfume shop, sampling all the testers. The scent of jasmine clung to me – a novel experience at this stage in a road trip, where the scents are usually far more malodorous. Gradually the whiff of seaweed and the salty tang of the waves lapping against the nearby beaches filled my nostrils. Italians at play, elegant in their shades, jaunty hats and beachwear wandered idly across the road and I kept stopping at crossings every few minutes. The sun was hot, no cloud cover: that sea was far too tempting. I pulled over, strapped my riding gear to the bike and trudged through the soft sand, stripping down to my Y-fronts. My swimmies were tucked away somewhere in a pannier, but who cared. The water was delicious, lukewarm yet invigorating. I kept a beady eye open on my clothes, which were tucked inside my helmet. It was then I realised I’d no towel. That, too, was in the pannier. How easy is it to look cool, walking across a beach through crowds of impossibly attractive young Italians, wearing a pair of M&S underpants, arms full of clothes and with a crash helmet stuck on your head? I think we know the answer. I pulled down the visor to hide my blushes.
The last time I’d been in Venice, which was the next obvious overnight stop on my way back to Ljubljana, was when I was 20. My mate Kevin and I had been working in a school in Bavaria and we’d saved up our pocket-money wages to make a train trip to Venice. Impoverished, we stayed in a youth hostel, where – bizarrely – someone had nicked my toothbrush and comb (I had hair back then). We existed on cheap pizzas and beer. One day we took a boat to the Lido di Venezia. I’d been studying Thomas Mann’s novel ‘Der Tod in Venedig’ and wanted to see the hotel where Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s film version eventually succumbed to cholera. We hired a ciclocarrozzella, one of those four wheel pedal contraptions, and set off along the lido. Kevin and I were fit in those days and we pedalled harder and harder to see how fast it would go. Very, as it turns out. But only in a straight line. A sharp bend approached and we realised the brake levers were for show only. As the thing lifted off onto two wheels there was an ominous thump-thump and the machine began hopping like a demented rabbit. Back on terra firma and rapidly halted, we looked at each other with that expression that can only mean ‘Oh shit!’
Both wheels were buckled. We tugged and pulled and got them roughly straight again, but the bike now seemed to have got a bad case of the hiccups with every revolution and certainly wouldn’t stand our combined rugby-playing mass. We walked it back to the place we’d hired it from, saving our re-mount until the last possible moment. The chap who’d served us seemed surprised we’d returned early but clearly had played this game before as he ran a practiced eye over the rims and announced an eye-watering price in lira as recompense. The rest of the holiday even the beer and pizzas were out. Tap water and bread can be very wholesome.
So, with shiver-inducing memories of Venice in mind I decided to give it a swerve, as it were. Besides, riding through there would be impossible and nowadays it was crammed with cruise-passengers. I’d heard from one of the hotel staff in Gubbio of a place that was like its famous near-neighbour at the end of the lagoon, but where there were no tourists, just locals and Italians on their hols. Chioggia looked promising the moment I arrived. It had old houses right on the waterfront, with lovely buildings and canals, elegant low bridges that crossed over them, with just enough room beneath for small boats, of which there were thousands, to pass beneath. Churches, a tall Romanesque clock tower, restaurants and dinky little alleyways with dingy bars, from which excited rapid Italian chatter and singing emerged. I liked it immediately. I found a hotel on the beachfront, tucked the bike away safely and walked in to enjoy a pizza – for old times sake, you understand. And several beers. Ditto. Kevin’s lived in Hong Kong for years and I rarely see him now, but I toasted those crazy days of nearly half a century ago. I felt old, just thinking about all the water that had flowed under my particular bridge.
The following day I got up early to take the bike into the heart of Chioggia, to take some Venice look-alike photos before the streets filled with fishermen, setting up their stalls for the day. Don’t bother with the Big Man, go there instead. Just don’t say I told you to.
Ljubljana
Venice flashed past as I stayed on the toll autostrada, enjoying the relative sanity of northern Italian drivers. My reverie was shattered by a sudden downpour and the arrival of a Mercedes that insisted on hanging inches off my number plate, despite my best efforts to shake him (or her - couldn’t see) off. Eventually he/she got bored, overtook and disappeared into the grey spray. The rain didn’t let up until I reached the transport depot on the outskirts of Ljubljana, where I was greeted again by Tony (South to Sicily, 1st June 2025). I noted that all the pot plants had been removed from the staircase. Presumably so that I couldn’t destroy the rest of them. I waved goodbye to my trusty Honda and left it in their care. It would be a few weeks until I’d be reunited with it. The bike hadn’t missed a beat and seemed to hold no lasting grudges for having been dropped twice in quick succession. It sported some souvenir scratches, though. All part of the experience, I thought.
The city itself was charming. A castle, river, friendly folk, an excellent brewery tap and a trip to jail.
Ralph and I had booked accommodation in the Hostel Celica when Plan A was on the cards. A prison for over 100 years it is now a rather hip, arty boutique hotel. When Plan B (I.e. Italy, not Croatia) crept out of the woodwork, I’d cancelled the booking, not knowing how B would be. It was now fully booked, so I was lodged in some faceless corporate place downtown, but I wanted to see, like on TV’s Bullseye, what I could have had. The main gate seemed to have been left open. Careless, I thought, already getting into the jail vibe. The second heavy metal door was ajar, too. I prised it wider with a grunt and squeezed through. Yup, it’s a prison. Brick corridors, arched cell doors with those little shutter windows. I liked the look of the jailers, though. Mia wore a nose ring and had purple-yellow hair over one ear, matched by a buzz cut on the other side. A 70’s hippy tie-die hemp dress and sandals completed the ‘I’m in for possession..’ look.
‘Yes?’, she asked. I explained. ‘Follow me – I’ll show you some rooms.’ She grabbed a big loop of jangly keys and off we trotted to see some cells. Think psychedelia meets Scandi-minimalist meets Anthony Gormley, literally in the case of Cell 119, because he designed it. I was particularly captivated by #111, featuring a hole made by a wrecking ball, with a vulva-shaped window, symbolising rebirth. The one I had been booked into, ‘Oliver - you’re in Cell 116’, majored on the theme of ‘eye’, the bed bottom representing an iris and pupil. Keeping an eye on the inmates took on a whole new slant.
On my way up to see the castle I had to cross the Dragon Bridge, flanked by fearsome dragon statues (well, they wouldn’t be lions, would they?). Legend has it that when a virgin crosses the bridge, the dragons wag their tails. They seemed very still that day. I had a sad mission to carry out. I’d forgotten to pack in the bike panniers my beloved Swiss Army penknife, the chunky one with all the accoutrements. I knew that the scanners would pick it up in my cabin bag at the airport and a lengthy interview with security was something I was keen to avoid. I leaned over the parapet of the bridge and dropped it into the Ljubljana River. ‘Bye old pal,’ I muttered as it plopped into the green-grey waters.
Reflection
As my trip drew to a close, only a flight to Gatwick and a train home still to go, the bike being shipped separately, I reflected on my weeks on the road. It had turned out very differently from how Ralph and I had imagined it. Perhaps that is the nature of adventure travel, never quite knowing what’s going to happen. I’d discovered a whole chunk of Italy, got a feeling for the place and its people, its history and culture, good and bad. It hadn’t captivated me like Spain but then again maybe knowing the language is the key to unlocking that deeper appreciation. I’d got used to being on my own, travelling solo once more. For all its plusses of freedom and lack of compromises it opened up my weaknesses of indecisiveness and of not knowing when to stop riding; I missed also the companionship of a good friend.
Most of all, though, this journey had been one where I had battled with my conscience, of wondering whether I’d been selfish in going abroad at all when my mother was so evidently fading away. In the long hours in the saddle I kept asking myself the questions to which I couldn’t find the answer: there’s often a reason not to do something, so how do I live my own life and yet do the right thing? I resolved to go to see her as soon as I arrived back in the Midlands, as I had done as soon as I’d returned from Norway the year before.
I gently pushed open the door of her care home room. She lay in bed, looking frail and as old as her years. She was in her nineties and those decades lay heavy on her. Less than a year ago she’d greeted me jauntily while doing a crossword. She’d listened raptly as I told about our Nordic exploits. Now? Now, she lifted her head a little, a small smile on her lips. She said she loved me and I told her so back.
As I started to speak of where I’d been her eyes gently closed and she drifted into a sleep, still holding my hand, her grip growing fainter.
Sometimes the hardest journeys are those where we don’t move at all.
Epilogue
My mother passed away five days later. I was in Guernsey.
© 2025 Stephen Oliver
You can find my book North to Norway in paperback and Kindle format on Amazon.