2010 Rallies & Events
European Bike Week 2009 Part II
Story by Sedrick C. Mitchell, Photos provided by Harley-Davidson Presse Service – Köln, and David Hayes
(continued from Monday, January 25)
Jeff and Kris Thorpe of the Milwaukee HOG Chapter are a couple of Americans who crossed the Atlantic for the 2009 European Bike Week event. They had a great experience, and here is their profile and story they told:
In early 2009, we started kicking around ideas about where to go for our 25th wedding anniversary. I read about European Bike Week in an issue of HOG TALES back in 2003. I wanted to attend EBW back in 2004 for our 20th anniversary but we opted for the Route 66 trip instead. So I had EBW on my “bucket list” for the last five years. Once the decision was made to attend EBW, we had to decide how many days we were going to be in Europe and how many days to actually spend at the rally. Kris also wanted to visit Lucerne, Switzerland and Venice, Italy. We both wanted to visit Salzburg and Innsbruck, Austria.
We rented a car for the entire trip because the Harley rental was a little too pricey for us; the dealer wanted to rent it out for the whole week and we only wanted a bike for the three days that we were going to be at the rally. We left Chicago on a Thursday night and landed in Munich, Germany the next morning, picked up our rental car, and headed for Innsbruck. It was raining that day so we looked to our GPS for hotel selections. We found a great little place in Patsch, just outside Innsbruck up in the mountains. On Saturday the sun was out and we walked around Innsbruck again and toured Shloss Ambras and the Olympic sites. Later in the afternoon we headed back into Bavaria to tour King Ludwig’s castles at Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein. On Sunday afternoon and Monday we toured Lucerne, Switzerland and rode the cable car up to the top of Mount Pilatus. We spent our 25th wedding anniversary in Venice at St. Marks Square and ended the day with a gondola ride.
We arrived in Villach, Austria on Wednesday afternoon and luckily found a hotel room in downtown Villach for the night. We attended the rally all day Thursday and Friday. After the rally we headed up to Salzburg for a day and went on the Sound of Music tour and walked around Salzburg taking in all the sites and the history. We ending up in Dachau, Germany Sunday intending to go to the concentration camp memorial but it was closed on Mondays. So we drove into Munich and walked around the MarienPlatz to see the Glockspiel and the Hofbrauhaus.
We liked renting a car and doing our own thing. We had a relaxed time schedule and we could stay as long as we wanted in each place and not have to worry about a tour bus schedule. We didn’t pre-plan any hotel rooms except for a couple of nights during the rally.
We especially liked the mountains and the scenery of Europe. There’s so much to see and do because there is so much history. The weather was good and I enjoyed sampling the beer from each city we visited. It’s a good thing that our rental car had a GPS, but we still got turned around a few times. I liked driving on the autobahn and autostrada but the tolls in Italy were quite pricey.
Not many bad things happened to us on this trip. Of course the exchange rate hurt us monetarily, but we were determined to attend Bike Week and to be in Venice for our anniversary…no matter what. Traffic in Milan, Italy was a little crazy so we opted not to stay there, instead we ended up at a great hotel in Bergamo, Italy.
Regarding the Bike Rally, we were very impressed with the massive size of the Harley Village. The location in Faak See was beautiful, I really liked looking at all the custom bikes at the bike show and looking at the awesome bikes built by the European bike builders. We were constantly looking at the HOG rockers to see where everyone was from and we saw rockers from all over Europe. The only bad thing at the rally was the price of t-shirts at the vendor tents.
For more information on European Bike Week, log on to www.europeanbikeweek.com