Reader Ride: Turkey Antalya to the Aegean

If you were to ask me to pinpoint when it all started, I would have to think back to one night a few years ago. I was flipping through channels looking for something to watch and that’s when I saw them, those two British actors riding their R 1200 GS bikes “the long way round” the world. That’s when my obsession with motorcycle travel started.

Sure, I had owned a bike before then, a 1999 V-Star 1100 that I regularly rode through the Canadian Rockies, a mere seven hours from my Saskatchewan home. But now I had images of discovering foreign lands and people on two wheels. My fixation on the matter was such that I somehow managed to talk my wife into learning to ride in preparation for a trip I had yet to plan.

Being a regular guy, there was no way I would be riding around the world any time in the near future, so I finally settled on Turkey, a land that has the mystique of the Middle East while still basking in the relative comfort of Europe. The trip was set for May and was part of a larger one that also had us visiting Germany and Syria. We would, however, only be riding motorcycles in Turkey.