My Motorbike, My Freedom

There is a magic and solidarity that come with two-wheeled journeys

- Xavier Alberti

FOR AS LONG as I can remember, I always understood that riding a motorbike was the beginning of a journey from which you never return, even when you put your feet back on the ground. On a bike you must keep moving forward. Because if you stop, you fall off. This is probably one definition of freedom.

Before this, though, is the first feeling of freedom: the bicycle. I remember my first bicycle so clearly, its colour a 'racing' red. I must have ridden thousands of kilometres, must have invented a hundred stages of my own personal Tour de France. Cycling is, first and foremost, a form of wandering that gives free rein to your imagination. Every time I crossed the avenue of plane trees that led to the village square of my childhood, my bicycle allowed me to experience fantasized sprints amid cheers of an enthusiastic public. And it was under these same plane trees when, a few years later, on an icy morning in this small Provençal village, my grandfather Louis gave me my first moped.

It was an orange 103 Peugeot, recovered in a dump, and which Grandpa Louis had repaired himself. The expression on my face when I saw this moped was probably one of the most joyous in my life. As I grabbed it, I knew that this machine was going to make me happy and be part of my emancipation from childhood.

THE SENSATION DRIVES US TO SEARCH EVERYWHERE FOR WINDING ROADS.