CHARLES MOURER GOES TO EUROPE

Castle Rock man takes to faraway roads on his bike

Charles Mourer may have been born to ride. But he didn't discover that fact until he took up motorcycle riding so he would have something to do with his six children. Upon returning from a trip to Minnesota with his oldest son in 1977 he was so hooked he turned around and did it again a half hour later with his next oldest son. Since then he has taken motorcycle trips to Canada, Mexico and Central America, as well as a 25,000-mile tour of Europe this past summer. At 56, Mourer is a walking advertisement for travel on a bike. "You dip deeper into life," says Mourer, an earth moving contractor from Castle Rock. "With a motorcycle, all the barriers are down. You instantly have friends." Mourer also believes in the serendipity of travel without reservations. "The whole idea is something can happen," he says. "If you make reservations, you've created a box you have to travel in." Nevertheless, he spent several days preparing for his four-month European journey. Maps and travel books fill a huge drawer in his family room. He estimates he and his 23 year-old son, Marlow Mourer, who joined him for two months of the trip, packed 50 pounds of guidebooks and maps. Among the most used were Rick Steves' guidebooks and the Let's Go series written by students at Harvard. Two weeks before he left, Mourer says, he laid out all the things he wanted to take, and

then asked himself 'How can I lighten the load?' " Everything had to fit into two small bags on the side of his motorcycle. In May he shipped his Honda ST-1100 to Frankfurt, Germany. Mourer says he has learned through experience that it is cheaper to ship the bike if he is going to be gone for more than three weeks. He then spent three weeks on the road in Central and Eastern Europe by himself. "When you travel alone," he says. "You find very quickly whether you are your best friend or your worst enemy." In June, his son joined him with his own bike, a ZX-11 Kawasaki. After his son flew home, Mourer picked up his wife, Nancy, in Switzerland and they spent three more weeks on the road. Throughout the trip, the Mourers stayed in bed and breakfast inns, private homes and small hotels with bathrooms down the hall. "By going upscale you don't get anything except to be with other American tourists," he says. Mourer, who doesn't speak any foreign languages, says he seldom had difficulty communicating. He recounts one episode where he and his wife went into a German restaurant after riding in the rain. Wet and cold, they were having trouble figuring out the menu until the man sitting across from them offered to help. Unable to speak English, the man made animal noises for the different meat dishes on the menu. "The ice was broken, we were part of the group," Mourer says. "Instead of a language barrier, it's an opportunity to communicate in a different way." One of the highlights of the trip came about because of the universal language of motor cycles. Mourer says he and his son were visiting  Versailles outside of Paris and

returned to the parking lot to find a group of policemen around their bikes

"The first thing that occurred to us, was that we had done something pretty wrong, he says.

But the policemen turned out to be motorcycle enthusiasts who invited the Mourers back to their brigade headquarters for steak  and salmon.

During his trip, Mourer toured 14 countries, including what used to be Yugoslavia. He's already planning another trip to Europe next year and would like to ride through the former Soviet Union. "Instead of just reading about the Second World War, you can drive the route Hitler took into Russia," he says. "It kind of makes it all come alive."

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