June 4, 2005: Birthday Bash in the Hills

With the Moto Guzzi dealership, Alis has collected a local and international crowd of extremely interesting people, some of them bikers and some not. The bikers tend to be from out of Italy, and many of them have endless stories of travel and excitement. "When you go down the hill into Dubvronik," Tony told me, "they may still have a stop sign there, so expect to slow down."

He and his wife then launched into a story about how, decades ago, they'd motorcycled in that area and zoomed down the hill into Dubronik passing the stopped cars thinking that it was a traffic jam. When they got to the bottom Tony said that there was a stop sign and a policeman who, alerted by the sound of a motorcycle engine going at full velocity, had held up his hand.

Tony couldn't stop at that point without crashing and zoomed right by him. He was ready to slow down and come back but when he looked into the rear view mirror saw that the policeman had his handgun out pointed straight at him, so instead he accellerated. "So we raced through all of Dubrovnik at about that speed...wish we could tell you more about it."

From noon to midnight we lounged around the little house that was built for a shepards family hundreds of years ago. There was procchuito and melon and olives and bruchetta, parmesean cheese, salad, Parma ham and processo and sparkling red wine in unmarked bottles with metal caps bottled by a neighbor. There was meat - marinated skirt steaks, pork kabobs, mushrooms, more steak and then more prosecco and then I lost track! Check out the photos.

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