PART THREE
WHERE TO?
The bike is a pen, the road, the rider’s unfinished autobiography.
—MARK C. TAYLOR AND JOSÉ MARQUEZ
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Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
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It’s a world with 20,000 television channels. . . . Get as far away from it as you can.
—HONDA AD
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A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
—JOHN STEINBECK
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Mmm, boy. This is the life! No more worries—no romantic hangups—no nothing! Just my whirling wheels—and the open road ahead of me!
—CAPTAIN AMERICA, FROM CAPTAIN AMERICA #130
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When people asked me . . . why I had chosen to ride a motorcycle round the world, I had dozens of ingenious explanations. . . . The honest answer was too short and uncomfortable. I did it because I felt like it. All else followed from that.
—TED SIMON, FROM RIDING HIGH
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The key to a good ride is to ride. You can’t make memories sitting on a couch.
—STEVE REED, FROM ROAD TALES
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Prepare. As a rule a first-time, multinational, transcontinental journey such as crossing Africa, the Americas, or Asia needs at the very least one year of preparation.
—CHRIS SCOTT, FROM ADVENTURE MOTORCYCLING HANDBOOK
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The first commandment for every good explorer is that an expedition has two points: the point of departure and the point of arrival. If your intention is to make the second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don’t think about the means—because the journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as many means as there are different ways of “finishing.” That is to say, the means are endless.
—ERNESTO “CHE” GUEVARA, FROM THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
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Be careful going in search of adventure—it is ridiculously easy to find.
—WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON
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We host several rides, the most notable being the 11-day, 11,000+ mile Iron Butt Rally. Additionally, the Iron Butt Association hosts the Saddle Sore 1000 (a 24-hour 1,000-mile ride), the Bun Burner 1500 (1,500 miles in 36 hours), the Bun Burner Gold (1,500 miles in 24 hours), the 50cc Quest (Cross Country in 50 hours or less), the National Parks Tour Master Traveler Award (visit 50 parks in at least 25 states), the coveted 10/10ths Challenge (10 consecutive 1,000 mile days) and the almost-impossible to get into 100K Club (100,000 miles or more in one year).
—STATEMENT OF PURPOSE FROM THE “IRON BUTT” ASSOCIATION
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Trying for the Iron Butt on my bike was like running a 5K on one leg.
—SCOTT HATHAWAY, WHO RIDES A 1988 YAMAHA TÉNÉRÉ DUAL-SPORT
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You have to have faith in this one goal, and when we all got together in Lisbon, it all gelled, suddenly all the pieces went together in the jigsaw. As we rolled through the whole thing, and everyone did their bit, and that’s why we got through.
—RUSS MALKIN, ON THE DAKAR RALLY
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By the end of the first day, we knew our simple idea to ride motorcycles across Asia had disappeared. Dehydrated, exhausted, lost, we were in some town we had never even seen on the map. The master route would be impossible, all that tying and retying of the red string was just wasted time. And we didn’t care. The simple idea of not knowing where we were going next seemed more exciting.
—PETER WINTER
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The best way to gauge your touring-fatigue level, I’ve found, is to get off your bike for a minute and shut it off. If your head is humming like a tuning fork and you can’t put change in a parking meter, it’s probably time to stop. Dropped gloves are a bad sign, too.
—PETER EGAN
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Nothing is better for your riding technique than twisty roads in the rain.
—NEIL PEART
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Motorcycles make it easy to get out of the city and camp. And they’re a hell of a lot cheaper than fancy cars.
—CASEY TORRANCE, WHO RODE THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE FROM CANADA TO MEXICO ON A KAWASAKI KTM 450 MOTOCROSS BIKE
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Try to become a custodian of your environment, somebody who uses it without destroying it—that, Virginia, is a relatively new point of view in our throw-away culture. You’ll be able to take a measure of satisfaction in knowing that you’re preserving a dwindling resource and keeping the sport enjoyable—and viable, too.
—BEN HANDS, CYCLE MAGAZINE
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Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.
—CHARLES KURALT
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To mankind’s age-old comment on the journey of life that the first one hundred years are the hardest, the traveler on a motorcycle can add that the first thousand miles are equally tough.
—ROBERT EDISON FULTON JR.
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[I]t is time again to remind you that Baja is quite intolerant of those who ride beyond their abilities.
—CLEMENT SALVADORI
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To me, the perfect motorcycling experience is getting up every morning knowing I’ll be riding all day on roads and through scenery I’ve never seen before, to a destination I’ve never been, and with the knowledge that I’ll be doing the same thing again tomorrow, and the next, and so on. If heaven exists, it will be like this for me.
—FRED RAU, FROM MOTORCYCLE TOURING BIBLE
• • •
The stars streaked the night sky with light in that little mountain town and the silence and the cold dematerialised the darkness. It was as if all solid substances were spirited away in the ethereal space around us, denying our individuality and submerging us, rigid, in the immense blackness.
—ERNESTO “CHE” GUEVARA, FROM THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
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Oh, public road, you express me better than I can express myself.
—WALT WHITMAN
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Then spring came, the great time of traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting ready to make one trip or another.
—JACK KEROUAC
