BookReview: The Road to Gobblers Knob
It wasn't long after I had confessed that I was thinking of getting back into biking that I was handed the latest book from avid travel writer and biker Geoff Hill - The Road to Gobblers Knob.
Hill hails from Northern Ireland and while his daily grind involves feature writing at the Belfast-based Newsletter, his previous sojourns from the working world have taken him on a ride from India to Belfast and across the US on Route 66. What next?
Why Chile to Alaska, of course. The trip was a massive undertaking and relates a 26,500km journey along the Pan-American Highway on the back of a Triumph Tiger.
Incidentally, he claims to be the first to do this bike journey as well, though why anyone would bother is a question that comes to mind before you get started. Be sure there will be claims and counter-claims on this issue to come.
Regardless, Hill got something out of his system before he left: he loves his wife Cate. He loves her a lot. In fact he told us so many times in the first 50 pages just how much he loved her that I was sure of only one thing: he couldn't believe his luck.
This man intended to enjoy himself - and for months at a time. Only someone who is truly escaping the daily grind feels that guilty about the people left behind.
In terms of biking books, this is a perfect antidote to the polished and overly-promoted Ewan McGregor adventure The Long Way Round, where the actor and a colleague go on a long journey with only their trusty backup teams, helicopter, catering staff, film crew and emergency vehicles to support them.
Luckily for us, like McGregor, Hill wasn't alone either. The adventures of his comrade, Clifford Paterson, a Scottish Isle of Man winner turned businessman helped bring this story to life in a way that otherwise would have required a lot more teasing. Picture a lone Belfast man talking to himself for 320 pages. Hard going for us and probably not as much fun for him.
Throw in a crazy Scotsman on an Aprila Pegaso 650 and you get something much richer.
And since just about everything that Hill and Paterson had was begged, borrowed and occasionally stolen, they won my sympathy from the start.
This is a great yarn, and in the best tradition it's in the build-up that the reader's imagination is captured. Would they get their bikes, blag free flights and kit, get time off work and convince the wife? Honestly, these things somehow became exciting - the boring details that stop our weekly pub talk in its tracks. Could this dream really be made a reality, and on the cheap? Then, after that, we had the crime in Colombia to look forward to, the roadblocks, dodgy policemen and border crossings and Clifford's endless pursuit of local women. Politics, adventure and the curse of the eternally optimistic all rolled into one.
But ultimately this story is about the open road, the wind in your face and what's around the next corner. Our two amigos pass through countries and landscapes that most of us have only dreamt of.
They sleep in convents, castles and cabins while their bikes manage to somehow make it through another day. They meet countless bike fans and would-be bikers at every turn and somehow they all bring good fortune. Well, almost all.
Given that they were thousands of miles from a bike shop for most of the first half of the book, it's no surprise that when that Triumph warning light started flashing in chapter nine, somehow, ridiculously, you're glued to the page.
And by the time that most necessary of crashes did come - after all what's a story without a fall - I was even shocked and excited.
But, of course, there is no build-up to a crash in writing. You can't romanticise something that happens so quickly. The world just comes up and meets you. For me, this clash of the reality of biking and the romance of the journey is what I enjoyed most and Hill's style, honed over years entertaining and surprising readers across Northern Ireland, suited it perfectly.
That slow, caustic wit that comes out of cities like Belfast and which can treat terribly serious subjects with an abandon that only the truly accurate can conjure humour from.
This is an adventure story and it doesn't disappoint.
The Road to Gobbler's Knob: From Chile to Alaska on a motorbike, by Geoff Hill is published by The Blackstaff Press