I got my motorcycle and car licenses almost simultaneously when I turned 16. My dad had been riding motorcycles and touring for years. To date he has certainly travelled north of a million kilometers by bike. At 16 it was pretty cool for me to then start taking short trips and eventually as you will see elsewhere in this blog some much longer adventures together. As I started developing this blog I had a notion that at some point I would pause and reflect on what was my first long solo tour from the summer of 1984.
Pause …..reflect….strain to remember…..reflect…..where did I store that memory….oh yes here we go, file accessed.
I had a job at the time and was going to school to tidy up a few things so I might be in a better position to focus on a career path. Translation didn’t care particularly for school then realized very quickly how essential it was going to be to any kind of meaningful future, drat.
I had an idea for a trip to the west coast and once I got started in a career I knew that for a few years anyway this would become infinitely more complicated. I would like to take full credit for this idea but the inspiration came from a similar trip my father had taken by land yacht around 1958 with a friend of his. Though if you talk to him about it, it was a way bigger adventure.
I believe Ecclesiastes 3 speaks to there being “A Time for Everything” and goes on to note 14 different items. I am confident had motorcycles been invented they would have made the list at 15. I think The Byrds put this biblical verse to music with “Turn, Turn, Turn” and the exclusion of motorcycling was simply an oversight on their part or perhaps lyrically it is difficult to rythme anything with motorcycle. Bicycle……icicle……popsicle……ya complicated.
I digress. At the same time the stars aligned in the spring of 84′ to repair some damage I had done to my knee. By early June, with considerable effort, physio was ahead of schedule so with the blessing of the therapist I was good to go so I surmised if this was going to happen this was indeed the time for this thing.
The following are from notes I made in a journal each day. Keep in mind I’m trying to capture the thoughts I had as a 21 year old.
9751km but this does not count a couple little side trips. One being a day in San Francisco from my aunts home in Woodland, California. I tried to reconstruct this with the aid of modern GPS mapping software but my map program didn’t like it when I tried to navigate around San Fran……as I recall I didn’t much care for it either at the time so I completely understand.