Free Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There by Paul Carter Page A

mannered, very dark and handsome, always well dressed and groomed, has a ridiculously big, charismatic smile and speaks with a bog-thick South American accent.You know, the sort that makes women glaze over with mental images of being undressed by Antonio Banderas. I see a guy who sounds and dresses like the cat from Shrek and is about the same size too.
    I was grabbing a quick lunch break with Diego and filling him in on all the latest happenings with the bike run. He was stuffing his wife’s empanadas from a lunchbox into his face. The wonderful aroma brought back memories of the first time I met Diego’s wife, Veronica, and her amazing empanadas.They were coming over to our place and earlier that day Clare had asked me to move Sid to the other end of the table, so I picked him up, high chair and all, twisted, leant and bent over, putting my back out and writhing in pain on the floor while Lola berated me for using all the bad words at once. I crawled to the bathroom on my stomach, grabbed some pills leftover from a bike stack I had a few years before and all was fine. Diego and Veronica arrived with the empanadas. She was gorgeous and gracious, of course, and I attempted to extend every gentlemanly courtesy, but on 40 milligrams of morphine, I actually appeared mentally incompetent or psychopathic or both. I could not stop eating the empanadas; needless to say the evening was fun for me and a disaster for Clare. Anyway, since then I’ve been addicted to Veronica’s empanadas.
    So back to Diego who, having demolished half a dozen, was grinning at me like a well-fed hamster. ‘Pol, can I come wid you, my friend?’
    ‘Well, yeah, course you can, mate, but we’re riding hard all day every day, so no mincing about, no grinning or hanging around like an extra from a pirate movie.’
    ‘Pol, wat are you talking about?’ He looked genuinely puzzled as he flicked a speck of pastry off his Hugo Boss sleeve then flashed a grin at a random passerby.
    Several phone calls the next day had all the guys who were coming with us to Speed Week diverting to Corowa instead. Simon and Howard both decided to ride their bikes down from Brisbane. Simon was on an antique BMW R60 and Howard was riding a Buell he had managed to load up with enough gear to make it look more like a Pakistani mule. Also on the way was Brendan, my photographer mate. At the time he was running about in the outback trying to get a picture of some ultra-elusive native nocturnal bird. Brendan’s not into birdwatching, he’d rather set fire to his underpants than creep about in the bush at night, but as soon as some muppet told him no one’s ever captured it on film he was off like Bear Grylls after a juicy grub.
    Then I started the phone calls to get both Diego’s and my bike on freight to Adelaide. This is when I discovered that I had missed my window for road freight out of Perth to Adelaide by one day. So I tried the train, no dice, and alternate routes, no time, so I called some specialty bike transport companies.
    ‘Where from?’ they asked.
    ‘Perth.’ I held my breath.
    ‘Forget it,’ they said.
    So then I thought about riding over, but my fuel tank is too small, so I considered hiring a ute, putting the bikes on it and driving them over myself, but that just sounded silly. So I called a friend, Ashley Taylor, who runs Pentagon Freight.
    ‘You’re a lucky bastard,’ he said. And I was. Ash had a truck leaving Perth for Adelaide the day after tomorrow, and there was just enough room on the back to put two bikes. There was only one hitch: we had to put the bikes in crates.
    So I called the companies that make crates to order, but there was either no time, no response to messages or no actual sense of effort. That meant I was going to have to build the crates myself. Erwin called me from a rig somewhere in the South China Sea while I was on my way to the timber yard to ask how it was all panning out. I got as far as explaining the crates when he