Written by Owen Clarke

The high noon heat was abominable, rising off the asphalt in a noxious haze. For the first time in my life, I found myself wondering if my motorcycle’s exhaust was cooler than the ground beneath it.

Our Royal Enfields were running on fumes, so Santino and I had pulled them over to a roadside gas station to fill up. The station’s windows were dark, no attendant was in sight. The place looked closed, if not abandoned. I stashed my motorcycle helmet on my handlebars and squinted into the smeared glass, rubbing the back of my neck, which was already prickling with the early stages of sunburn.

Near the gas pumps, an elderly, pot-bellied man reclined on a red plastic stool. He was barefoot, his swollen feet kicked out in front of him. The fellow tugged on one saggy earlobe and offered something to Santino in Italian, gesturing offhandedly.

“He says they don’t open ‘til two,” Santino translated. 

Two o’clock?

I couldn’t think of any business that opened that late back home in the U.S. besides a strip club or a sports bar. Did this old guy work the pumps? Couldn’t he just get off his ass and fill us up? What sort of half-assed operation was this? 

This had been something of a pattern here in Italy. Restaurants and stores opened and closed at odd hours, or sometimes not at all. I’m on my way, seemed to mean, I’ll arrive eventually. Work seemed an afterthought. If I need to, I will. If I don’t, why bother? 

My American hustler’s mindset rankled. Why is everyone in this country so damn lazy? Santino, of course, was Italian, so I was loath to insult his home.

“What do you wanna do?” I asked him, rubbing sweat from my eyes.

It was a quarter to one, and the prospect of sitting out here on this burning asphalt next to the old man for more than an hour was unappealing. Then again, we didn’t really have anywhere to be. That was the beauty of the endeavour.

Santino shrugged. He glanced across the road. A sweaty teen in a white apron, presumably a waiter, stood beneath the olive green awnings of a café, smoking a cigarette and scrolling on his cell phone.

“How about an espresso?” Santino said, grinning.

It would be my fourth espresso of the day. My pulse was pounding like a jackhammer, and I was beginning to feel like I’d developed an acute case of ADHD. But even though we were 350 miles north of Rome, the adage seemed to apply.

So we crossed the road, slung off CTB26 packs, the only items of luggage each of us carried, and sat down to drink espresso.

When Santino had called me a few months prior and asked if I wanted to ride motorcycles around northern Italy with him, he didn’t have to do much convincing. I was sold in about ten seconds.

After nearly a decade of freelance adventure journalism, I was jaded and burnt out, and contemplating a career change. When Santino called, I’d been sitting at my kitchen table making a pros and cons list, thinking about leaving freelance writing behind in search of greener pastures, ones with a little bit more of a financial upside and a lot more stability.

I’d turn 30 on my next birthday, and felt strangely ‘behind’ on life’s traditional milestones. Marriage? Kids? A house? A stable income?

I had a storage unit, a P.O. Box, two motorcycles, a PlayStation 5, and an English degree that artificial intelligence seemed to be fast-rendering obsolete.

In light of all this, a few days cruising the sun-baked hills of Lombardy on two wheels with Santino seemed, at least, like a ticket to a better headspace, if not perhaps one that would help me understand what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So I said “Hell yeah” before he even finished talking. 

The remaining ten minutes of that phone call were spent planning how we’d make it happen. How do we get the motos? Where do we want to go? How do we pack?

Ten seconds deciding, ten minutes planning, then ten weeks waiting for the day my plane landed in Milan.

Santino had sent me some EVERGOODS kit for our mission: a CTB26 (Civic Travel Bag 26L) and CAS1 (Civic Access Sling 1L), both with the new rugged Ultra Black Magic fabric, along with a pair of compressible packing cubes, one TPC4 and one TPC10.

I was new to EVERGOODS, but an old hand when it comes to packing for motorcycle trips. I’ve spent most of my career riding bikes in foreign countries: Ecuador and Vietnam, Albania and Peru, India and Guatemala. 

From a packing perspective, motorcycle trips are often masochistic endeavours. You stuff yourself into so much padding and armor that you look like you’re cosplaying as the Michelin Man, and pack so much gear—saddlebags, tankbags, tailbags, handlebar bags, and backpacks—onto your bike that your weight and bulk starts to rival a Fiat 500.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If you approach it right, motorcycle travel can also be a healthy exercise in forced minimalism. There’s no trunk, no back seat. So what and how you pack really does matter. The weight and bulk of the gear you’re bringing directly augments your riding experience, both in terms of safety and comfort. Whatever you pack is either on your back, or on the outside of your bike. So your packing influences how easily you can corner or split lanes, and how much your shoulders hurt at the end of the day. The less you bring, the cleaner you ride.

This streamlined approach is what Santino and I were after in Italy. We wanted to move light and fast, without an abundance of gear or apparel to hold us back. But we also didn’t have a clear goal. We just wanted to ride, and see where our heads took us. 

That’s also why Santino wanted us to ride with EVERGOODS packs. We didn’t equip our Royal Enfield motorcycles—a Bear 650 scrambler and a Himalayan 450 adventure bike—with saddlebags or even tank bags. We carried everything on our backs, in our CTB26 packs.

For me, this bag was a silver bullet. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t loaded with bells and whistles. It just did its job. With the help of the cinch collars on the compressible packing cubes, I fit enough clothes—shirts, pants, underwear, socks—for five days of riding into the CTB26. The rest of this intuitive 26-liter backpack swallowed all of my essentials: passport, wallet, keys, gloves, laptop, charger, notebook, camera, toiletries, hat, sandals, and half-empty pack of cigarettes that I told myself was my last, ever.

Then the CTB26 slipped onto my back and disappeared. (I routinely sat down in chairs forgetting I had it on.)

That take-it-in-stride approach is also why, when we showed up to find Milan being zapped by 100-degree temperatures, we decided to ride over the Alps to the higher elevation climes of Chamonix, France, to cool off. That’s also why, when we learned that icy-rainstorms were battering the alpine passes leading to Chamonix, we bailed on that mission and headed to the shores of Italy’s world-famous Lake Como instead.

Staying in Italy wasn’t our original plan, but it worked out. The riding was nothing short of sublime.

We tracked one-lane roads that wound through sun-dappled hillsides, blanketed with beech and chestnut forests, terraced olive groves, and hamlets and villages that looked like they’d been frozen in time since the Middle Ages. 

When the heat got to us, we parked our bikes on the pebble beaches of the lake, dumped our CTB26s, and waded out into the shallow, warm waters for a swim. We left the bikes wherever we wanted, without worrying about anyone stealing luggage off of them, because nothing was strapped to them. All our kit was on our back.

On that searing afternoon when we were near-out of gas, I think the old man opened the pumps around 2 o’clock, but I don’t really remember. The urgency had gone. Santino and I had an espresso under the oscillating fan of the café’s deck. Then we moved on to crusty paninis and cold Peronis, watching the afternoon heat soften over the valley. 

At one point, Santino wandered off and took photos. I wrote some bad haiku in my notebook, and then scrawled out a postcard to the girl I was seeing, then realized the futility of mailing it to her (it’d almost certainly arrive after I got home). Then I stared up and watched a cloud float across the surface of the blue. 

Eventually, we remembered why we’d stopped at this café in the first place, and we went across the street and fueled up the motorcycles. Then we hopped back on the bikes and kept riding.

On all of my expeditions and trips, I try to come home with at least one concrete lesson. These lessons are often rather banal, and consist of me eating or drinking something I shouldn’t—undercooked lamb in Morocco, tap water in India, expired cheese in Kosovo—and my digestive system going nuclear. In Italy, I felt like I gleaned something a bit more profound.

The best time is when you’re not checking it.

The best time is when you’re not checking it, and the best pack is the one you don’t have to check in the first place, because it’s so streamlined and dialed that you know exactly what’s in it, where everything is, and how to access it at all times.

I didn’t come back from Italy certain about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but I did throw out that pros and cons list. I’m not sure if I’ll give up writing for good or not. Why make any decision “for good” in the first place? 

For now, I decided to stop checking the clock. Call it and move forward. Bring less. Pack with intention, then start doing what really matters: enjoying the ride.