(We pick up our story several weeks after the Vatican Millennium maelstrom, where two figures are speeding along in the sanctuary of a Cinelli company van...)
“No, no no! I won’t wear young boy’s short pants any more! I want to wear trousers and pants-clips like a big boy!”
“Freddie, wake up!”
“And I hate pedaling with a handlebar basket and mudguards.”
“Freddie, it’s ME, Rosi. PLEASE wake up!”
“Mama, is that you? It’s so dark I can’t see... My dyno hub must not be working.”
“FREDDIE, FREDDIE, PLEASE! PLEASE!!! ...smelling salts, but what to use? Ah, here we go.” (She unscrews the cap off a fresh tube of tubular cement.)
“Ahhh... Ahhh... Phew. Tubasti Extra... Oh Tullio, I feel queasy...”
“FREDDIE, FREDDIE... Your awake!”
“Rosi...? Huh...? Where am I...?”
“Oh Freddie! I was so frightened. I found you while I was making a delivery of some Spinaci T-shirts by the back door of the Holy City. You were babbling unconsciously, there, lying in a heap, in the alley, against the Vatican’s dust bins...”
“Rosi? Oh I can’t begin to communicate to you what horrors I’ve recently witnessed... But where are we going?”
“To Istanbul.”
“Istanbul...??? You remembered!!!”
“How could I ever forget... You once secretly confided to me, over several bottles of expensive champagne, that it was your one, unfulfilled dream... I found you in some sort of crisis, and I instinctively knew this must be time for that journey.”
So now, with my Eagle readership as my witness, it is time to make that sojourn, Eastward from Turkey, using only indigenous 3-speeds as my transportation.
And so I pedaled off, into my own dream... -Global Freddie (aka Euro Freddie).