Maschine INTELLIGENCE
WE LOVE EUROPE. We love riding bikes off-road. We love riding bikes on narrow twisty bitumen roads. We love exploring new places. We love eating good food. We love seeing places of great natural beauty. We love sharing good times with good people.
With this in mind, our 2019 Maschine Adriatic Adventure tour along the Adriatic coast of Europe was promising to be a smorgasbord of good times. Highlighting our “to do” list on the 15 day tour was attending the KTM Adventure Rally Europe which for 2019 was based in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Now, as for most Aussies, our knowledge of Bosnia & Herzegovina as a country was pretty limited and most of us would be hard pressed to point to it on a map of the globe. Nonetheless we were keen for adventure and going to the KTM Rally seemed like a damn good excuse to check out some new countries.
MUNCHEN IN MUNICH
Our tour was to begin in Munich, Germany. We had a group of five riders joining us with Trudi being the organiser of men and amazing accommodations and myself acting as chief navigator and lead rider.
Our first dinner in Munich was taken at an awesome beer garden, Hofbraukeller. The meal, as expected in Germany, consisted of meat and potatoes with one single tomato as sole contribution to non-carbohydrate or protein food source. Our waitress, dubbed “Euro Rachel”, was rather forceful as she tried to stuff Jeff’s mouth with his uneaten potatoes. It would appear leaving potatoes on your plate is a sin in Germany!
SADDLE UP TO SALZBURG
Roberto our trusty driver arrived on schedule in front of our Munich hotel at 9am to transport us and our gear bags to Austria. For anyone who has not been on a German Autobahn it can be somewhat surreal seeing cars racing along at 200km/h or more. What can be even more surreal is being in a Mercedes Sprinter van loaded up with 7 riders and all their luggage barrelling along at 160km/h without a problem!
Gunter is our man in Austria and once again he had our fleet of KTM rentals primed and ‘Ready To Race’
