Holiday reminder: The XT500, Verdun, the battlefield

You can go on holiday like this: you get up, pick up your papers and a toothbrush, get out and head off. There was no cell phone. There was no GPS. Sometime in the afternoon there is - after an overnight stay has been arranged in the outskirts of Verdun - a stop on a village terrace.

The battlefield of Verdun

The French still call WWI 'La Grande Guerre'. In those years, the old military tactics clashed with the latest martial strategies. For example, the British traditionally marched with a bayonet on the gun in a broad front towards the enemy. That enemy had just discovered the blessings of the machine gun and had immediately mastered completely different rules of the game. Many tourists search fields and forests with metal detectors. Sometimes one finds a bomb or grenade. "BOEM". Another mixed message in the newspaper.

It is about dinner time

The XT500 gets a kick, and hop: Verdun, I'll come again. About the same unpaved inner road that I left the city over. I'm almost there already and then someone turns off the light. Later I open my eyes. I have pain everywhere. A vague urine smell hangs in a dim room. There is moaning beside me. There is someone who has three infusions and is swarmed. I feel vague while a beautiful Asian girl comes to stand next to me. Her name is Sister Maria Theresa. She says. She promises to call the doctor.

All beautiful nurses

There is something to me that I should sit on the motorcycle instead of lying in what apparently is a hospital bed. Then a jovial man in a white doctor's coat comes over to me. He looks at me shaking my head and reports that the hospital does not often receive more victims from the Verdun battlefield. Tells what has been done to me after an illegal motor-racing 12-year-old had found me.

Saved by the fire department

He had contacted the pompiers because, due to his age, he did not want to go to the gendarmerie on his big brother's motorcycle. Because of the painkillers I saw more and more Theresa's sister. A junk had murdered such drugs. On the third day I found myself cured. I pulled the drip out of my arm. Picked up the strip of painkillers on the bedside table and unsubscribed. My luggage was delivered by the innkeeper. I didn't close all the buttons.

The train journey home was long and painful

There was blind panic on the home front. It is not nice to be hugged when you have a pair of broken ribs and are colorful and blue. The reason for that panic? An ANWB repatriation figure had placed the writhed XT500 next to the garage with my parents without further explanation.

A blowout

The cause of the dive into oblivion turned out to be no Ricard. In my most recent favorite corner, the XT500 apparently had a blowout. This was apparent during the patient's check.

But how many Maria Theresas were there?

My doctor went gray when he saw that the painkillers in France were covered by both the Opium Act and the Arms Act. A serious junkie could have had a few very nice days with it. He confiscated them. I only remembered a mass of Maria Theresa's. But that must have been just one. The XT500 has been rebuilt. With an American 590cc set. It made the engine even more fun.