Couple Recycles World Adventures

They weren’t exactly bored; they just didn’t want to get that way, at least not right away.

They were young, in love, profitably employed, but unlike most newly married couples, they could see 50 years down the line: He would still be making artificial limbs in Lyon, France, or maybe he would be retired by then, or even dead. She probably would have left her career as an interior decorator to raise a family--and then what?

So Claude Herve, then 28, and wife Francoise, 23, decided to take a trip, just in case the opportunity didn’t arise again. “We’d never traveled before,” Claude says, “and we wanted to see where we were going, so we bought a couple of bicycles. . . .”

Nine years, 60,000 miles, 36 countries and one baby later, the Herves are in Van Nuys, taking in the L.A. sights, doing a little laundry, stocking up on diapers, preparing to shove off again--for Central America, South America, North Africa, wherever.

The trip hasn’t been continuous. The couple “stopped to help in a hospital in Calcutta; we stayed a year in Thailand with the Cambodian refugees--I taught them how to make artificial limbs; then back to France to earn a little money lecturing and writing--I don’t have Rockefeller for a father--and to learn Chinese: We were in China nine months.”

In New Zealand, the Herves paused again--for six weeks--while Francoise gave birth to daughter Manon. “We had a special bike seat made, a cover for sun, mosquito netting,” Claude says. “She was no problem, especially in the beginning when we had a built-in food supply.

“It’s only in the West that they think it’s hard to travel with a baby. In the desert, they put the kid on a camel. In Tibet, they tie it to a yak. Manon is a better traveler than we are.”

And when it finally comes time to settle down? “If we’ve learned anything,” Claude says, “it’s that every day, anywhere, there’s something new. Life is boring if you look only at the problems, not the joys.” As for the world, the man who’s seen most of it concludes: “It’s a lot better place than most people think.”

When a Freeway Accident Means a 15-Mile Tailgate Party

So what do you do, stuck in your car virtually motionless for a five-hour stretch? Any number of things, it turns out.

One of California’s traffical embolisms developed last weekend, hardening a main artery, the San Diego Freeway, for a good 15 miles after a tanker-truck jackknifed north of Oceanside. Worst was the San Clemente-Oceanside span. “You couldn’t escape,” says Sandra James, whose L.A.-La Jolla trip started at 8 a.m. and ended at 5. “Twice we tried the only alternate routes, through Camp Pendleton. Sure. Tell it to the Marines.

“It was beyond frustration: Cars breaking down, mothers walking through traffic carrying babies. Worst of all, I smoke. My daughter Thomica doesn’t. It was her car. Never again.”

Chrissie Martin of Long Beach, scheduled to co-host a baby shower in Leucadia, used the down time to wrap gifts, make up games and watch in bemusement as fellow detainees dealt with their predicament: “Some were taking it out on their cars, literally punching them, but people generally were adjusting: sunbathing on hoods and roofs, having tailgate parties. Lots of music. Dancing. Interauto flirtations. The rest areas were jammed with parties. It was kind of fun.”

Realizing she’d never make the beginning of the shower, Martin decided to make a sign, marker on poster board, to prop in her car window: “CAR PHONE? Please Call (Leucadia number). Chrissie Will Be Late.”

“People laughed,” Martin says. “I never really thought it’d work. But when I finally got to Leucadia, they told me, ‘We had the funniest phone call. . . .’ Just some great guy on the road, I guess.”

‘Lost Atlantis’ Story Is All Greek to This Robin Williams

It being Earthquake Month and all, there was probably a moral to Robin Williams’ travel talk the other day at Pepperdine, albeit an elusive one.

First of all, Robin Williams wasn’t that Robin Williams, even though this one definitely had his moments. This Robin Williams lives in Laguna Beach and has long since staked his claim to one of the world’s great jobs: leading tours and filming travelogues. The film du jour dealt with Plato’s putatively “Lost Atlantis,” not only relocating the sunken city/state to the balmy green Aegean but simultaneously shedding light on a few biblical phenomena as well.

Plato was wrong, Williams said with little fear of slander. The Greek philosopher picked up on an oft-told tale originating with Solon, an Athenian lawmaker who’d got it from the Egyptians during a vacation south. They in turn had clay-tablet records of a people who had disappeared, or at least abruptly stopped wintering in Egypt the way they used to. Nobody blamed the food; Solon suspected a cataclysm, and years later Plato arbitrarily penned the “Atlantis” saga.

No way, Williams said. What happened was that the volcanic center of the (now Greek) island of Thira rumbled, roared, spewed an an eruption “four times the power of Krakatoa in 1883” and settled back into the sea. The Minoans of Thira, a highly advanced, life-loving civilization of the Bronze Age, vanished, leaving only a fishless, bath-warm caldera.

The eruption and subsequent temblor, Williams noted, also triggered the biblical rain of frogs, assorted plagues, the parting of the Red Sea. . . .

Now about those earthquakes. . . .