CHAMPAGNE TOURING

I UNDERSTAND THAT SOME air crew refer to passengers as “screaming cargo”. That’s not me anymore. The unconscious do not scream. I pop a couple of tablets, choose the most boring film on the entertainment system and head off to dreamland. I’ve seen the first twenty minutes of ‘A Star is Born’ seven times. Anybody manage to stay awake and knows how it ends? On second thought, don’t worry.

Flying from Sydney to either the US or Europe offers a major advantage: you tend to stumble off the plane at 6.00 in the morning, with the whole day in front of you. Feeling as if someone has been giving your brain a workout with a blender, admittedly, but still. On my recent trip to the Cologne motorcycle show INTERMOT I collected my bag and made it to the train by just after seven. Frankfurt airport is highly efficient, except that they still make you catch a bus between terminals. How hard would it be to put in a shuttle train?

Although the 45-minute non-stop trip to Cologne costs 71 Euros, it’s always a pleasure to catch a European train. You can get a decent breakfast or just coffee at a reasonable price, and looking out at the placid countryside streaming by is a pleasant way to return to the real world from the unnatural experience of being flung across the world in an aluminium tube, watching a boring movie and then sleeping in a position that leaves you with a painful semipermanent crick to your neck.

My taxi driver couldn’t find the entrance to Cologne Harley-Davidson, so I had to drag my suitcase over a hundred metres of cobblestones. Nobody does cobblestones quite like the Germans – actually that’s not true, but we’ll get to that later. Detlef at the shop could not have been kinder and even