Ahead of the thunderstorm over the Grossglockner

Day 2 of a motorcycle trip with a passenger: ahead of a thunderstorm front over the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, through the Soča Valley, and one sentence at a hotel desk.

I was up at seven. I’d already checked on the thunderstorm the evening before and talked it over with other bikers at the hotel, and in the morning it was confirmed once more: a thunderstorm front was moving in, over the Alps by the afternoon, and we wanted to stay ahead of it.

So off we went. A little after nine we were on the bike, and it was the best decision of the day. Right at the start there was a reservoir along the way, murky, but somehow pretty.

That’s the real art of motorcycle travel, and it has nothing to do with riding technique: you don’t ride against the weather, you ride ahead of it. Leave at noon and at four you’re negotiating right of way with a thunderstorm. Leave at nine and at four you’re two hundred kilometers farther on, watching the whole thing from the other side.

The day started in Germany and ended in Slovenia. In between lay Austria and a few kilometers of Italy, 336 kilometers in all.

Around midday came the pass: the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, 2,504 meters at the highest point. Thick fog at the top, 11 degrees Celsius, and apart from a wall of fog there was nothing to see.

On this trip I learned more than in the weeks before it.

A naked bike isn’t the wrong bike for tight hairpins, but it’s a very honest one. The handlebars are narrower and lower than on an adventure bike, the riding position pushes weight forward, and with a passenger and luggage the center of gravity moves back and up - the bike stops turning in willingly and pushes on the way out of the corner instead.

And up front sits a completely ordinary upside-down fork. No Telelever, no magic trick: the front dives under braking like on any other motorcycle, you get every bump unfiltered in your wrists, and if you brake too late and too hard into a hairpin, the weight is on the front and the whole rig stops turning in. No net. Just you.

What actually helped was the engine. The 1250 boxer pulls out of the basement of the rev range so cleanly and so linearly that in a hairpin you work more with the throttle and less with the clutch. You still have to use the clutch. For a beginner that’s the real difference: an engine that doesn’t stutter or stall at 2,000 rpm takes part of the job off your hands in a hairpin, the part most people fail at - the clutch hand, which has to decide between slipping and letting out while everything else is happening at the same time.

And Lisa behind me went with it. From the first kilometer. A passenger who fights the lean turns one unit into two systems arguing over the same axis. She never did that. To this day I don’t know whether that was talent or simply a refusal to interfere.

Break at the top. Lisa took photos. None of them has a view, all of them have the wall of fog.

Then down to Heiligenblut and on to Oberdrauburg for lunch, a good hour and a half. After that through the Gail Valley in Carinthia, and briefly Italy near Tarvisio. Just before Predel Pass lies a lake, Lake Predil. We stopped there and rested by the water for just under half an hour. Then over Predel Pass, 1,156 meters, the border into Slovenia. Into a country that keeps one of the most beautiful and one of the most honest roads in Europe ready.

The Soča

If you don’t know the valley: the water is turquoise. Not “turquoise” like in the brochure, but like a color-rendering error, a green-blue that shouldn’t belong to a river. It comes from the limestone flour, it changes with the light, and for the first twenty kilometers you keep looking at it, even though you shouldn’t.

And then there are the signs.

A motorcycle, tipped over, in red. No text needed. At some point the Slovenes stopped phrasing things nicely and now put up pictograms that look like “Attention, motorcyclists fall over.” Regularly. You are not special.

You can laugh about it. I laughed about it. My line on the subject: “But we don’t fall over. We get knocked over.” Until someone explained to me that evening what those signs actually say - more on that in a moment.

The reason for the signs isn’t the surface, and only partly the curves. It’s the locals.

For long stretches the road winds along a rock wall, and in a series of corners the entry is hidden by an outcrop. You can’t see in. You can only guess.

In that situation the tourist does the sensible and the wrong thing at once: he stays wide, because wide promises a better view, and that makes him slow, ragged and unpredictable. The local does the unreasonable and the right thing: he knows the corner by heart, cuts it, takes the ideal line and is through before the question comes up. You can tell the difference in riding technique by the license plate.

Two riding styles, the same corner, no shared assumption. That works until the local meets the tourist at the outcrop, who is sitting right there, wide and mid-lane, on the brakes.

That’s how it went through the valley, corner after corner, until evening came and we needed a bed.

The hotel that evening was near Nova Gorica, the city right on the border with Italy. We followed the navigation straight there. A building that looked like a lot more than I was prepared to budget for.

And then came a surprise that made me revise a cliché.

Premium, yes - but without German premium prices. For what was on offer, the amount at the front desk was cheap. On top of that I got something no hotel in Germany would even consider: I was allowed to park the motorcycle right next to the main entrance. Not in the parking lot. Not “around back, there’s a carport.” Next to the entrance, in the front desk’s line of sight, under the canopy.

And while I was still filling out the form, I told the man behind the counter about the great road and the funny signs. Without looking up, in the tone of someone reading out a weather forecast, he said:

“That’s the most dangerous road in the whole country. At least one dead every month.”

No reproach. No lecture. No “be careful.” Just a number he had obviously had to say often enough to say it without emphasis.

That evening I sat on the terrace longer than I’d planned. For the first time on this trip I thought about the fact that the pictograms on the side of the road aren’t decorative.

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Day 2 in numbers

October 21, 2026 · Written by Adrian, put into words by AI.