In the beginning there was an idea. Ride to all the contiguous USA states including Alaska and DC( designated a state for the purpose of this ride) in alphabetical order visiting the one place each state only has one of, the state capital building. This morphed into the same ride in Australia, a much simpler route but in many ways it was an even more difficult ride in spite of only having 8 stops across 16000 km. I named these rides the ACE series, Alphabetical Capitals Expedition.
This started off as a one man ride. Life however had other ideas. During the 2019 IBR Wendy Crockett and I rode a large part of that rally together, completely unscripted and unplanned, no comms connected, our rhythms of fuel and sleep really, really closely aligned. We talked about this phenomenon, we are both solo riders who, typical of LD riders, generally prefer riding alone especially during some thing like an IBR.
Later in 2019, I showed Wendy the ride plan I had and just like, we decided to ride it together. Australia first, USA second, 2022 was the target year.
That was lucky as it turned out, the world took a dump on everyone and we bided our time with Wendy departing the USA on April 1st, it seemed an appropriate date to our sense of humour given the planned undertaking.
The 21 days I led our expedition in OZ through April pales into insignificance to the 119 days Wendy led as we traversed the USA from the 3rd week of May onwards. As we rode this adventure she kept referring to herself as the secretary but I call her the Undisputed Queen of Long Distance Motorcycling.
Without her constant guidance, this ride if ridden as a solo rider would have been over at day 89 with only 30000 miles and a very high degree of dissatisfaction.
We matched each other in resourcefulness and resilience, our strengths complementing each other as we worked the daily issues and discussions. We had support from a small group of friends that when needed stepped up to give us the help required in moments of need. Some of the assistance required was in moments of dire need, some of it incidental, all of it necessary, appreciated and contributed to us realising our goal.
All of this brought everything together so that at 23.45 on September 24, we lowered our sidestands in Pontiac IL with 80200 miles on the GPS trip odo.
We battled what some news outlets were calling the worst heat event ever endured by the USA. We believed them as week after week of over 100F and high humidity was tough to endure. We rode through some tough, tough hot days, iced up in our gear to mitigate the unrelenting physical and mental strength sapping weather and after finally capitulating in the brain frying mid afternoon and seeking an ice cave, we emerged to find ourselves riding in some extremely wet weather that on one occasion resulted in multiple people dying from lightning strike as we forged our way towards our next Capital .
We got blown all over the road crossing I80 on mulitple crossings, endured a blizzard heading south through Wells, Nevada in the night, persevered through more heavy rain events than a fish would like to endure and as May became June, then July, then August and finally September, at last we felt the season start to change.
Equal to the heat and humidity as something to be managed was the ongoing mechanical issues we endured with the BMW, none of which were anything to do with BMW's supposed lack of reliability or component longevity.
We had illness and medical interventions that required hospitalisation that stopped us dead in our tracks along with the aforementioned mechanical issues, but through all these time losses we never lost faith in each other or that we could succeed, not even as we watched the 1000 miles a day o/a window slam shut as the daily milage average over the whole ride slid inexoribly lower and lower in spite of our riding days constantly being over 1100 miles a day. It helped that our completely bent and warped senses of completely inappropriate humour could be fully unleashed on each other as a vent and a way of managing whatever had befallen us in real time.
Its a tough story to tell, our ride across two continents and 5 months. We had many highlights, many low lights, many events were both were happening at the same time. We had moments of perfect peace when the world allowed us to see its beauty in a sunset playing over the country, or an eagle taking off from a roadkill or a corner flowed with perfection.
The perfect example of a mix of moments occurred one clear morning we are examining rear tyres. These look pretty good we say to each other. 12 miles later I'm stopped on the highway with a 1/4" round hole in my rear tyre. What could we do; out with the gummy worms, the glue and start punching in sticks all the while munching on a shared chocolate doughnut we had in a tankbag, how lucky are we, we said to each other in that beautiful morning light. It’s all about perspective.
We never thought that after all the years we rode Long Distance rallies that by and large were successful and uneventful that this ride would test us. It would be inaccurate to say we hit our limit to absorb and deal with the setbacks, but it's an honest statement when we say that there were many days when our patience was tested to its extreme end and only the support of the other got us over that immediate hump.
This is the very basic story of our ride. A ride that very nearly totalled 100 000 miles across both continents. Its not about the riding or the destinations, it’s about how two people took two 20 plus year old bikes, one of which needed fuel and tyres, the other needed a constant flow of repairs and fuel and tyres and had an adventure that had more left field events than could have ever been planned to need to manage and kept on keeping on all the while laughing at the absurdity of just never giving up.
