Reunification reminiscence

It was May 1990 and there was Pete, on his knees, gazing at the dismantled timing side of his Rapide. We were in a campsite at Schmockwitz, just outside Berlin, five months after the fall of ‘The Wall.’ Pete said: “Now I remember why I sold my last Vincent twin…” How had we ended up there?

In May 1989, my wife Kath and I had been on a trip to East Germany on a modern BMW and had a very interesting, if different, time. We had made some good motorcycling friends in the Harz region of East Germany and had great memories of the trip. At the end of that year, the wall came down.

A good friend, Pete Lee, a partner at Unity Equipe in Rochdale, had been very interested in our trip to East Germany. On hearing of a rally in Berlin to celebrate the occasion of the wall’s destruction, Pete suggested that we go on our Vincents. Pete had a series C Rapide and mine was a