May/Jun '03 - RoadRUNNER

RoadRUNNER

May/Jun '03

May/June 2003

Wine Country, CA

May/Jun '03 Premium Content

Wine Country, CA

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

Hawaii: Surf to Summit

May/Jun '03 Premium Content

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

Riding Along Route 66

Roundtrip Tour Premium Content

Riding 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

Colombia, Ecuador and Peru

May/Jun '03 Premium Content

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

May/Jun '03 Premium Content

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

China: Down the Old Silk Road

May/Jun '03 Premium Content

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

Europe: 13,000 Km in 25 Days

May/Jun '03 Premium Content

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