Riding With Lady Luck: A journey across Europe in a Grand Cherokee Jeep
It was at a toilet-stop somewhere in Hungary that the song came to me. This drear place of nothing by the side of the road, just a pull-off with a scrubby bit of grass bordered by a fence, with a grey toilet block in the middle, two metal doors, one for the Ladies and one for the Gents, but the same filthy, smeared toilets inside. In the end I decided to go against the fence. Then I got back in the car and sat down, exhausted.
There were several cars lined up beside the road. A couple of lorries. Almost everyone was asleep.
A lorry pulled up about 50 yards ahead. The driver got out and went to look in the toilet block. He looked in the Gents and he looked in the Ladies. Then he went back to his cab and got some toilet paper. He saw me clocking him. We both knew what the situation was. These disgusting toilets. But he had no choice. He disappeared into the Ladies and came out several minutes later feeling a whole lot better I expect. He washed his hands with bottled water, got into his cab, then he drove off.
I was so tired. I’d been travelling now for nearly a whole day, with just a short break in some service station somewhere in Germany. All those miles of ravelling road from Calais to wherever I am now. The whine and hiss of the traffic. This world of ceaseless movement, of ceaseless distraction, of cars, of lorries, roaring and racing in either direction, from somewhere to somewhere else. No one wanted to be here. A kind of dead world, dusty grey and full of danger, always moving, always raging, always screaming, like a terrified monster in its death agony.
You have to keep your wits about you all the time, especially in Germany where there is no speed limit and they’re driving these vicious machines that rush up from behind at 140 miles an hours, lights flashing, and you have to get out of the way quick. You’re watching all the time, checking your mirrors, staying alert, focussed, concentrating on the road ahead.
Every so often I’d find myself drifting off into a thought and I’d have to stop it. You can’t afford time off in that lethal world. There’s only you, the road, and the other cars. Everything else is superfluous. It’s a kind of moving meditation on mortality. One slip and you could be dead.
I’d driven through the night, through the darkness and through the rain, hearing the squeak of the wind shield wipers rubbing back and forth sluicing diamonds from the glass, watching the lights from in front and from behind, mile after mile of road in this great arc across a continent, sweeping though invisible landscapes and the shadows of mountains, like dark, unseen presences, through Germany and through Austria, through unknown borders between sleeping nations, through dreams and night time stirrings, through the first flickers of light on the horizon, the rising dawn, to this place – not even a name on a map – a toilet-stop in Hungary…
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