The Enchanted Vagabond
The Enchanted Vagabond
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
WHEN THE CARD CAME AT CHRISTMAS, I could see from the return address it was from David and Lucy, our friends in Florida. My parents’ friends, really, but we met them years ago on a winter trip to Boca Raton and immediately hit it off.
David and Lucy are a retired couple, but they both have that special ageless quality you see in people who don’t know how to quit having fun. If they aren’t restoring an old wooden boat and sailing it around the Caribbean, they are circumnavigating the U.S. on a Gold Wing, or fixing up an old camper and driving to Alaska. Needless to say, their Christmas letters are always good reading.
This year, however, the letter was extra thick, and when I opened the envelope, a small color photograph fell out.
The photograph showed a tanned young man in a crew-cut and sunglasses sitting on an old Parilia 250 motorcycle. It was a younger Dave, wearing Chinos and a short-sleeved shirt, looking very all-American, early-Sixties style, like a member of the Kingston Trio, or a youthful Bob Cummings.
The Parilia, with its aluminumalloy fuel tank highlighted by a bright slash of red paint, had a skinny spare tire coiled across the fork and an enormous military-looking bundle of gear piled on the back seat. There were palm trees in the background, and an old tropical tin-roofed house. I looked at the back of the photo and found a printed inscription:
1961 Italian 250cc Moto Parilia Belize City, Belize, Central America; World Tour - Nov. 1961 to May 1967; 64 Countries, 123,000 miles on just the motor bike. “Enchanted Vagabond”
-Dave Winton With the photo in the envelope was a typed six-page travelogue, the story of his odyssey around the world. David had been promising for years he would write it all down and send it to me, and here it was. So I made some coffee, found a good chair and started reading. I won’t even try to relate all the details-just the high points and the route.
In 1961, David bought his Parilia from a West Palm Beach motorcycle shop, loaded it up with a WWII Army Ski Troop rucksack (which he had acquired the hard way-by being a Ski Trooper in WWII) and some saddlebags left over from a bicycle trip through Europe. He took a sleeping bag, a gasoline stove, an air mattress, a plastic tarp, some clothing and two years of savings, and set out to ride around the world.
He followed the Gulf Coast into Mexico, crisscrossed down to the Yucatan, bummed a cargo ship through the Panama Canal to Colombia and headed south, exploring most of South America. From Brazil to Italy, where the Parilia company happily rebuilt and repainted his bike, gratis, then a tour of Europe, circling down to Greece, where he met Stan Mott, of Venice, California.
Stan is a much-loved Road & Track cartoonist who once drove a go-kart around the world and immortalized his adventure in sketches and words on the pages of Karting World. Stan and Dave hopped a ship for Egypt and both toured North Africa, crossing paths many times after. (Mott was invited to race go-karts on a private track with Jordan’s greatest karting buff, King Hussein.)
Dave and his Parilia then toured the Middle East-from Lebanon, Syria and into Israel, up into Turkey, back to Italy (another engine rebuild), then through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. A Dutch cargo ship took him to Malaysia, another ship to Hong Kong, another to New Guinea, the Philippines and then a long tour of Australia and New Zealand. In 1967, he and the Parilia finally took a ship home, from Auckland to Port Everglades, Florida.
Six years and 123,000 miles on the bike’s odometer. Countless other miles in ships and planes and cars.
Reading about Dave’s trip now, a couple of things really stand out for me. First, this was not a let’s-get-thisover-with Great Circle jaunt for the record books. It was an open-ended, unstructured exploration of the world by a curious American who backtracked, side-stepped and took his own good time to see things, to meet people and to learn what they were about. No meter running.
Second, Dave made friends-and had friends-everywhere he went. No one can travel for six years just on savings. Dave was lodged, fed and partied in South America by foreignexchange students he had befriended in Florida. He was invited to stay at fire stations, welcomed by ham radio operators who passed along progress of his trip, invited to dine with fighter pilots at U.S. airbases, driven around ancient cities by old girlfriends. And so on.
He was, essentially, a part of that great internationalist karma that came on so strong in the late Fifties-a real belief that if we all helped each other out, then everyone could go everywhere, free from walls and curtains and lines on maps. He had lots of friends because he was one.
But the third-and best-thing about Dave’s Christmas letter is exactly that it is a Christmas letter. It arrived like a gift during the dark, cold part of the year and stirred up all those old instincts; the need to gaze for hours at maps; a sense that perhaps one’s French or Spanish should be brushed up on sometime soon; a reminder that if you just get off your duff and do a little planning, anything is possible.
It also fulfilled the highest expectation I have of any travel literature. It made me set the letter aside, take a firm grip on the arms of my comfortable chair and mentally pose that all-important question, “Where’s my bike?”
