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Miami, from outlet to outlet with our Visa card pouring smoke.

Harley Davidson, Miami

We’re already in Miami and a promise is a promise: we need to find out what the Cuban exiles say about the Revolution and Fidel. There. Nothing. They care about it as much as the Hillary/Obama primaries: they don’t give a damn. And this taking into account that Florida was state decisive in enabling Bush to humiliate Al Gore for a couple of hundred of votes. They’re just too busy leading a luxurious life to pay attention to what happens out there. And we can’t blame them, because as soon as we stepped into South Beach we got caught up in the same consumer fever, running from store to store like the possessed and window-shopping like a couple of yokels just arriving from the past century. Miami is so perfect a city it’s like Amancio Ortega dreamed it up or something. A city made into a mall with plenty of stores, impeccable sidewalks and first- class service.

In the USA everything is big. There’s abundance with audacity, XXL or super size me in everything you want, and in what you don’t want, too, from the free re-fill drinks to the ten-lane highways. With a single course served in local restaurants, an African family could eat for a week, and with the leftovers for six days. Nobody eats the whole thing. No way. Well, some do, but then you can see them bumping around on the street or asking for double seating on the plane. But the rest can’t wait to show their perfect bodies on the beaches, with amazing necklines and designer g-strings. It doesn’t matter if they ask for one or two courses, they never finish either; let’s throw the food in the trash, tomorrow’s another day… The doggy bag is for those poor people from Manhattan. In Miami nobody would dirty their fingers with grease from leftover pizza taken home. Hell no! You can’t do that. Julito Iglesias lives here.

But we didn’t come to Miami to go shopping or eat a giant hamburger, but to fulfill another one of our dreams: rent a Harley Davidson to drive on the famous Route 66, the road that covers America from coast to coast. However, when we went on the Internet to see the route in detail, myths aside, it reminded us more of driving through the Monegros than an odyssey worthy of a Ulysses on a motorbike wearing a leather jacket. To drive more than a thousand miles through forgotten villages is OK for the main characters of a B series road movie, but we prefer plan B, which is to ride our Heritage and scorch the 300 miles of Florida Turnpike that separate Miami from Disneyworld.

In the end we went to Universal Studios because Mickey doesn’t work every night. He’s no dummy. But we didn’t mind because the best attraction happened to be outside both parks: to dress up as Hell’s Angels, those troublemaking bikers who in the 1970’s popularized Harley Davidson motorcycles and the noise of its engine . As the slogan in the store where we rented the bike says: “Why drive when you can ride” – why drive a car when you can ride a beast. A Harley Davidson is like a wild animal from another world, with a carburetor instead of a heart but as alive as a raging bull. An iron animal you only have to fill its veins with gas for it to start roaring a metallic howl that accelerates your heart. A stream of adrenaline goes through your body until you release the clutch and start to feel like the master of the universe, where others don’t count, or even exist. There are only other bikers like you or like the one that just drove by: Terminator with his Harley Davidson. And he greeted you. Now you’re one of them.

Or not, you impostor. Get off the bike because the rental is over and at home a Scoopy is waiting for you. Oh yes, dreams also have an end. And American Dreams even more so.

Posted In: United States

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