by Chris Cowland –
To paraphrase the Eagles: “they can be heaven or they can be hell.” I have a couple of examples of each.
My first car was a 1960 Morris Mini Van, designed by Sir Alec Issigonis. It sported a tiny 848cc motor which could propel this luxury go-kart to around 75mph/120kph. Sitting so close to the ground on 10-inch wheels, this felt exceedingly fast! Sir Alec designed his cars with simplicity in mind. These early cars had small sliding glass windows which barely supplied a square foot of ventilation. Being a 17-year-old schoolboy, I could just about afford the $50 purchase price.
My first ever road trip was a 10-day tour a round France with my Irish school buddy Crazy Cormac. I packed a tent, a small camping stove, a kettle, some tea and a dozen cans of baked beans. I picked up Cormac in Dover, loaded his box of food, and we headed off and caught the Dover-Calais ferry. Sitting in the lounge, I asked Cormac what food he had brought. “Baked beans, a dozen cans” he replied. We sailed off into the Perfect Storm of flatulence … this was the road trip to hell.
Cormac scored first, his eyes gleaming like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. I chokingly cursed Sir Alec and his pathetic ventilation.
We varied our diet by occasionally dining at French restaurants. One memorable meal was in a seafood bistro in the harbour of Sète, a small fishing town just west of Marseilles, on the warm Mediterranean coast. It was made famous by the poet Paul Valéry and the singer Georges Brassens, and I vowed I would visit it again sometime.
The opportunity arose in 1978. I mentioned in an earlier article that I had met a Canadian girl who had passed the crucial test of not slamming the door of my 1948 MGTC. She and a girlfriend were planning their own road trip on motorcycles, meeting in the south of France, crossing through Italy and ending up in Greece. I was invited to participate in the first part of the trip, and would return on my 550 Honda after the girls met up.
Based on my glowing account, Sète became the focus destination. We spent several gruelling days covering the 600 miles through France, as we preferred the side roads and small towns to the Autoroutes.
As we neared the town, my chest tightened. Cranes were all around the skyline, old streets had been torn down and replaced with hi-rises, and the traffic to the downtown harbour was blocked solid. Imagine telling a new girlfriend about a quaint town like Langford that you had visited 10 years previously, with its country roads and tree-lined streets, and arriving into a traffic jam on Veterans Memorial. This naturally triggered our first row, but it also made me realize for the first time that I could not bear life without her.
Too tired to drive further, we found a cave to camp in on a secluded beach. As we watched the setting sun, listening to the crump of the waves, I asked her to marry me, and the rest is history. Thankfully, I had learned my lesson, and there were no baked beans on the menu.
