A Night to Remember
This was a day for working our way down the Aegean coast of Turkey and enjoying the influence of Greek architecture and culture on these Asian lands. We began with a pleasant outdoor very Turkish breakfast with the lapping waters just a few steps away. The biggest event was the arrival of the replacement “Princess Van”. I do not want to get into describing automotive interiors with all this ancient grist for the mill awaiting us, so let’s just say that Kim and Ann felt this new tricked out Mercedes Benz limo/SUV was much more in keeping with the style they had become accustomed and had expected. They were very happy campers and felt that Kaz had redeemed himself from the prior day’s Tijuana Taxi episode.
As they snuggled into their plush beige Corinthian leather seats, the rest of us strapped on our riding gear and hardware, readying for the ride. The most unusual mechanical maintenance underway was Bruce Rauner taking a ball-peen-hammer to the interior padding of his $600 Schuberth helmet to accommodate some strangely misshapen aspect of his head, which he described as more egg-shaped than normal. And I thought I had helmet fit problems!
We rode along the Aegean with the sun rising across the water from the East. The sun and the clouds were just as we had left them yesterday. We were headed to the Ancient Greek ruins of the Acropolis of Pergamon. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and sits high on a hill (acro) and was a city (polis) of great wealth and power in ancient times. Perhaps the most notable feature is how well it has survived the millenia in very recognizable manner. We walked up the stone path past the normal bevy of Turkish merchants trying their best to mimic everything from New Yawkers to Valley Girls. It’s more off-putting than you might think and I’m sure more-so than they believe. The site itself is large and with an amphitheater that looks to seat several thousand. That seemed large to us, but only for about eight hours. The story of Pergamon is typical of the area. The Greeks were eventually run out by the Antinorians of Persia and the story progresses to the modern era with the city being gradually abandoned to its own inconvenient location and its own grave robber in the form of the German railroad builder who got the Sultan to sign-off on giving him the pile of rocks on the site of ancient Pergamon. Naturally, he rooted around until he found the Temple of Zeus under a pile of dirt, and promptly shipped it off to Berlin, where it still sits.
After a long Acropolis tour and an even longer lunch set on the grounds of a hillside park surrounded by old stone buildings, we chose to boogie hard to get to our hotel 240 klicks away. We hit “the slab” (what we motorcyclists call the divided arrow-straight highway). Unfortunately, highways must be fed and this one was no exception. Except the toll system still had kinks in it trying to get nine motorcycles (eight with toll tags and one aberrant Ducati Multistrada without). I guess all roads lead to Rome, but just not on a clear paying basis. At a final toll booth outside Izmir, where I was doing the polite thing of going last, they were so confused by their own toll-tracking system that the kept a few of us waiting and waiting.
One of the Cardinal rules of jet fighter engagement is to never, never leave your wing man. So sayeth Iceman and Maverick. The Marines brag that they never leave a man behind, which is sort of the same concept. In the AFMC, we find talk cheap and we find that “Every nan for himself” is what we tend to do, regardless of anything we did or did not say in the locker room before hand. So, three of us toll-challenged riders got left at the gate while the others were lead towards the hotel, once again racing the sunset.
We all found our way to the very remote and very rustic hotel on a wooded hillside. Some of us were fit to be tied by the atrocity of being left behind, by the general malaise of a long, hot day, the difficulty of navigating the gravel roads on “the last mile” to the hotel, and to the climb up The 10,000+ stone steps to our waiting room and shower. Next time just leave me by the side of the road rather than face those finishing stairs. We had twenty minutes until dinner and we were told it was important to be timely. Without bags, it’s hard to get the shower thing going in the right direction on a timely basis. So I made a command decision (more like a hot grumpy decision) to skip dinner.
While showering, I was told by Kim that Kaz was pleading that we all go since he had worked on the arrangements for going on six months. I relented and toweled off so quickly that I put my underwear on backward (something I discovered later that night). What’s the old expression? “Nothing goes right when your underwear’s tight.” It all seemed ill-fated, whatever “it” was.
What Kaz had arranged was to rent out the ruins of Ephesus, one of the best-preserved Ancient Greek cities in the world. It was lighted resplendently and he had arranged a catered dinner, complete with string quartet, at the Library of Celsius…all to ourselves.
I rented Hearst Castle last year for Kim’s 60th birthday, so I am no stranger to grand venues, but this was an inspired choice by Kaz. The gesture and beauty literally brought several people to tears (including Kim). It was a perfect ending to an imperfect day and was certainly, a night to remember.