Chapter 103: Road Trip To Portimao

Jenny

Man, I loved this RV already. That thing was basically a very posh apartment on wheels, and whoever had designed that, had really given it some thought. Normally, caravans and RVs used liquefied propane gas for heating and running the stove, which meant you constantly had to change those red gas bottles, always just one explosion away from arriving at the pearly gates as a pile of Goulash. Our old camping trailers back home still had that system.

This thing was all electric. To make sure you weren’t dependent on external power supply, it had a small little second diesel engine, not much bigger than a moped engine, that ran the generator for providing electricity. At a camping site or in the paddock at a race track we would of course get external power supply, but in the parking lot of a motorway service station there was none such luxury.

After we had both emptied our bladders, I had prepared coffee, some toast and scrambled eggs with bacon for us. I left the onions out as I didn’t fancy dad or myself having to break wind every five minutes. Just seeing him grin from ear to ear when he ate his favorite breakfast made me just that little more angry with auntie Lydia, because that was another thing he had given up, just for her. All his favorite foodstuffs were anathema to mommy Meri and her obsession with the perfect nutrition for us athletes. Not being a skier, triathlete or race car driver, dad could theoretically eat what ever he fancied, but he didn’t, just so nobody else would feel left out, and auntie Lydia just took that for granted and still made it sound as if he was a shallow dick.

Well, after dad’s reprimand in the early hours of the day, it was clear I couldn’t get involved in that, but what I could do was making sure that for the next few days he would only get his favorite meals.

Not long after all these thoughts I nodded off again and I woke up to a rather unexpected sight. We were somewhere in the mountains, and we weren’t on the Autobahn, but on a winding country road, with dad working hard to navigate the frequent switchbacks.

“Are we lost?” I asked. “Weren’t we supposed to go on the Autobahn all the way?”

“We’ve just turned off it,” he said. “There’s a lovely camping site not far from here. I didn’t want to spend the day in a service station parking lot.”

“By the look of it, it’s on top of a mountain,” I pointed out.

“Not exactly,” dad said with a chuckle. “It’s nine-hundred meters above sea level, or three-thousand feet, as Ian would say. Sounds more impressive that way, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sounds like you were there before,” I noted.

“Not at the camping site itself. But Ian and I were in the village before, last year when he was on the way to Basel in Switzerland. I think he hired some instructor there for his flights to Courchevel. They have a lovely restaurant, but the food gave me nightmares.”

“How so?”

“We arrived at the time of carnival, and apparently a traditional dish for that time are Kutteln and Kalbskopf,” dad said and I saw him shiver slightly.

“Eew,” I shrieked and had to swallow down a momentary bout of nausea. “Green tripe and calf heads?”

“Yep, and it’s not a euphemism for something else,” dad said. “Mind you, it was a lovely place, and really lovely people, but that food...”

“Let me do the cooking instead,” I said, still feeling a little light-headed about the idea of plucking the meat of a cooked calf’s head.”

Dad chuckled.

“It’s not like we don’t have our fair share of scary food too,” he told me. “Back in your second season in ‘94 we took Ian’s late dad and John to watch you race in Senftenberg. On the way there we stopped at a countryside restaurant and I introduced them to Eisbein. You should have seen them, they were as pale as a chalked wall.”

“Too bad mom is too scared to cook it,” I said with a giggle. “I haven’t had one in years.”

Dad looked over at me, just for a short moment before directing his attention back on the road. “If I look into that freezer, I’m gonna find a pork knuckle, don’t I?”

“Yep,” I proclaimed, inordinately pleased with myself. “We’re going to have Eisbein, but only on the way back, because I always feel like I weigh a ton afterwards. Not good for a race.”

Mark

Holy cow! Matt didn’t know what kind of paradise he was walking into. Apparently Jenny had decided to go on some kind of charm offensive and woo me with the greatest food ever.

Granted, our eating habits had been a bit on the less entertaining side, since Meri had decided to decide our menu entirely based on data charts and scientific principles, but four Olympic medals in Sydney and many a podium in the winter had proven her right. Heck, even I was now fit enough to keep up with Jenny on our morning runs.

But all that aside, my first Schnitzel with potatoes, brown sauce and bacon-wrapped fried beans in close to a year, nearly made me weep. Regina was by far the best cook among us, but Jenny could easily compete. Considering that she looked like a carbon copy of her mother and had the same compulsive nudist tendencies, it was not exactly a surprise to see that she was just as skilled with a few pots, pans and a bunch of ingredients.

It was a matter of decency, after Jenny had spent two hours preparing the best meal I had had in a long time, that I would do the cleaning-up. This RV had a lot of amenities, but a dishwasher would have pushed it, so I cleaned the dishes the conventional way, while Jenny dried them and put them away.

“Right,” she said and hung up the dish towel to dry. “Time for a shower, dad.”

“Sure, go ahead,” I said.

“You won’t?” she asked back.

“Well, once you’re done, obviously,” I remarked with a slightly irritated shake of my head.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she argued, locking the door and closing the shades behind the cockpit before taking off her clothes. “We both fit in there. Do you want to waste twice the water and fill the waste tank in four days?

Regina

Well, I should probably keep that bit of information from my better half. If she were to learn that Jenny and Mark had feasted on Schnitzel and beans, she would probably blow a fuse, seeing this decadence as an affront to her nutritional authority.

What made me more proud though was that Jenny had managed to cook all that by herself to the point that Mark was waxing lyrical about it. It had been him who had delivered the day’s report in the afternoon.

“Where are they?” Meri asked, coming into the living room and I put the phone away, trying not to make it look too hasty, lest my better half’s sharp senses would smell a rat.