RoadRUNNER May/June 2003
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National Tours
Hawaii: Surf to Summit
For a lesson in atmospheric physics, riding a motorcycle up a volcano is tough to beat. And Maui provides the perfect lab: the 40-mile, helter-skelter Haleakala Highway. Rising 10,000 feet in 40 miles, it's the longest continuous climb in North America. And they say it's just as long coming down....
Along Route 66
You may know how it is. You're sitting through a long, cold winter evening beside the fireplace and dreaming about tours while the bike hibernates in the garage. Years ago I was in this situation. The fire crackled and Pink Floyd played in my headphones while I read an article about Route 66 in a motorcycle mag. The whole theme immediately captivated...
International Destinations
China: Down the Old Silk Road
Five months of preparations behind us, we finally have all the required visas and travel permits for China in our hands. We had been waiting for the written invitation of Almaty. Without it, we wouldn't get the visa for Kazakhstan. When we finally received the expected fax, our trip to China could begin....
Canada
Even though its name suggests a forbidding trail more suited to snowmobiles than motorcycles, the Icefields Parkway had been on my "must do" list for a long time. Often conjuring illusions of Everest – with vast swaths of snow, vertical walls of ice, and crevasses wide enough to swallow a tour bus – and, because it's there, I had to ride...
Colombia, Ecuador and Peru
Customs Office, Guatemala City Each of our four motorcycles now had 31 pages of documentation, ranging from photocopies of passports to typed forms with VIN and registration numbers. Thirteen people at 13 desks had to stamp each sheet. Mercifully, not all of the agents needed to be bribed. The strain began to show on our faces, along with the sweat....
Europe: 13,000 Km in 25 Days
You can easily call it a mug's game: We only have four weeks to travel more than 13,000 kilometers. In the process, we cross the boundaries of nine countries. Beginning with a ride to Spain's sunny Seville, the site of the last World's Fair Exposition, and Gibraltar, we "strolled" back to Antwerp before embarking on a much-anticipated trip to the Arctic...
Chronicles
City Portrait: Sydney, Australia
Before riding on a recent tour that extended up the east coast of the fifth continent, I took some time with my brother Daniel and friend Peter to explore a special site, Sydney, Australia's largest city and the home to those sun-filled summer games the whole world watched in 2000....
Loveride
Sunday morning at Glendale Harley-Davidson's 19th LOVERIDE the crowd is so tightly packed we're on a first-name basis. Twenty-four hours ago I took farm roads, not freeways, south from Monterey to Los Angeles. Most of these frontage roads were built over stagecoach runs profiling the land's natural features. Conversely, hopping one of the major freeways...
Wine Country
Warm gusts push me left and I fight back, leaning right. The mile-wide Carquinez Strait not only funnels the Sacramento River's watershed to San Francisco Bay, but, so it seems, all of the San Joaquin Valley's winds. I've just another quarter mile of the Carquinez Bridge to brave before I can begin riding some of the incredible back roads leading into...
City Portrait: British Columbia
December, Canada, and motorcycling are words you don't often find in the same sentence. But then there's Victoria. Sheltered on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, near the entrance to Puget Sound, Victoria is caressed by palmy breezes tracking in from the central Pacific, and protected from fierce Arctic air by the Coast Mountains. In a country famous...
