HUMM 2009 - Arrival and Prep Day
29 07 09 - 21:36 No lying in till 10am today. I awake at 4:25am to Dave knocking on the bedroom door (five minutes before my alarm goes off, it's as if he didn't trust me). Bleary-eyed, we load the last few things into the van and hit the road - down towards Cahors, autoroute south past Toulouse as the sun comes up and on towards Andorra, before climbing up into the mountains.We cross the border between Bourg-Madame on the French side and Puigcerda on the Spanish. There are no directions to the hotel, the organisers having stated that "if you can't find the hotel, you're not going to do very well in the event". Oh how we laugh as we roll up in La Molina and fail to see anything resembling the hotel. The proprietor of a restaurant points us up the mountain. The road workers further up point us back down. The receptionist at another hotel points us back up the mountain and obligingly marks a cross on a tourist map. Of course it's a map of the ski-slopes, not of the roads, but it's an improvement. Having ascended past the road workers again, and passed countless hotels, Dave pulls the van into a large car park so we can have another look at the map, and as we are pondering our next move, our eyes fall upon the large sign on the side of the building across the car park. 'Hotel HG La Molina'. That'll be it then.
Inside, we find the receptionist being interrogated by a rather irate gentlemen. It turns out he's here for the HUMM, and in making small talk about it, the receptionist has mentioned that you can't ride on the trails around the hotel, because they are reserved for mountain bikes. He appears to have decided that, rather than this referring only to the immediate vicinity, or there being some sort of misunderstanding, it must mean that there is no trail riding in the entirety of Spain. As he seems unwilling to let the poor girl attend to anyone else until she has either recanted her statement or revealed the location of the event organisers, we give up on trying to check in and wander off. One flight of stairs and about twenty paces later, and we find the organisers - Canadian motorcycle travellers extraordinaires, Grant and Susan Johnson - laying out t-shirts and event booklets in a small room adjoining the hotel bar.
Grant and Susan delivering the briefing. Chatting to them you'd never guess that they've crossed 5 continents and put over 120,000km on their 1986 BMW R80 G/S. Photo by Pieter Jellema
The briefing happens in laid-back fashion shortly after, and then we are left to our own devices for the rest of the day to pore over the map and checkpoint booklet. Or at least three of us do - Stephen is firmly esconced in the underground car-park transforming the F650GS from two-up, cross-continental tourer to mountain scrambler. We're not quite sure of the details of these changes, but Stephen is gone all afternoon, and arrives late for dinner with oily hands. In his absence, we make a plan which Dave assures me we'll "probably get round by lunchtime", and nip out in the van for a supermarket run - to France, as we can't find one that's open before we cross the border. As prepared as we are ever likely to be, Team Furieux eat dinner together before retiring for the night.
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