The decision to go to the Motorbeach Festival was easily made. It’s in Spain you know. No further motivation needed. I’m a fan of the country and of it’s inhabitants for a long time.  There’s less hypocrisy in Spaniards. They keep their shoulders straight. Less bullshitting. Good people in short. The group-pressure is a bit too much for this guy, but I’m a lonely fool, so what am I complaining about.

So we threw our gear in a big rental bus and off we drove. Happy to be on the road. Adventure here we come! One and a half day on the road. Nothing much happened. Boys in a neat hotel snoring away. Devouring coffee, beer, pizza and road. ‘Kilometer-vreten’ is a nice Dutch word for the activity. And I like ‘kilometer-vreten’. 

One of the better moments (in life) is passing the border of Spain. Everything changes. The atmosphere, the road, the colours, the gasstations, the quality of coffee and food. The landscape is the most significant. Dry mountains rise up. The colour chances from green to sand-brown and rock-grey. Roads get more challenging. Brakes start to squeak. The road goes from 4 lane to 3 lane death-traps, to narrow winding 2 lanes through mountains with views of waterfalls, sheer rock-cliffs and big birds of prey. Hard to keep your eye on the road. The beauty of it. Coming from the pastures of green grass, grass-falt my friend calls it, and distribution-hubs and other such wonders of The Netherlands. It’s different… 

Motorcycling like a fool over mountain roads with the low sun blinding the eyes clothed in jeans and tank top while deer are getting ready to take the leap to your painful death while you are contemplating that there is nothing to surpass this moment in your life. No way. The engine noise, the handlebars, the thump of this one cylinder 500cc engine, the road speeding below your unprotected ass. What’s better than this. Nothing! Okay let’s get some beers. That’s what you set out to do. A 24hr gasstation, nope, just for gas you fool. Let get back to this bar. A bloke knows a few words in Dutch. Nice guy. Got some beers. Not enough. A fancy bottle with water. Being the healthy boy. 

Back home. Home being the campo to be a camping. A few toilets for men shitting and women peeing. And shitting. And that’s it. Yeah bushes, some trees to keep you out of the blazing sun and some strange stalky vegetation. Just one stalk with nothing. And a lot of them. We were early. We got a good spot. Out of that sun. Just bought my first tent. Now I’m part of the tent-owning demography. New boxershorts too. Man, I’m so organised. I ‘belong’. Finally.

We are now in Motorbeach-land. Once you cross the gate you’re home-free. Big Guardia Civil Guys and Gals check your wristband. After that it’s anarchy. Everything is permitted, to a certain extent. No helmet, no license plate, no problem. Every motorised contraption that you can think of runs around. Small kids and old geezers, big bikes and small smelly screaming two strokes and everyone and everything in between.

But something’s missing… COFFEE! Weird. Spain without coffee. Asked a guy. Yeah that’s down there, pointing in some direction. Walked and asked about a little. No coffee. Then soothing reggae sounds coming from some settlement across the lake. I could get there, ‘there’ being a peninsula. It was some ways out but then there’s The Bike. Some guy was relaxing in a chair under a sign that said: COFFEESHOP, shouting: ’yes tomorrow at 900hrs we’re open!’  This settlement came to be our favourite hangout, for several reasons: Located on the shore of the lake, trees to sit under after a morning-splash. Coffee, breakfast, bocadillos with chorizo sausage, roasted by the skilled cook. There was even ‘healthy food’ with cbd-oiled tea. I was getting healthy!
And there were the lovable David, Conny & colleagues and all of them funky geezers.

What an amazing trip, what a great country, what wonderful people.

Joop