Please respect our intellectual property rights. Do not distribute any of these documents, or portions therein, without the written permission of Robert Higdon or the Iron Butt Association.
Written by Robert Higdon
I'd like to do that. I've been thinking about it since I was old enough to think at all, it seems. From my earliest childhood, as I curled up with a National Geographic magazine and stared at glossy photos of places that could not be more alien had they been on the western slopes of Neptune, I've wanted to travel, to be where I was not, to be a stranger in a strange land.
Whatever has to be done to prepare for such a trip, I have tried to do --- the visas, the inoculations, the bonds, the contacts, the other things without end. A year ago I didn't know what a multimeter was or how to adjust valves; now I know something about both. Law school was nothing compared to what I've been up to lately.
As part of this lengthy preparation, I've talked to the ones who've done the Big Ride. Their names are inscribed on the most indelible parts of my brain: Danny Lizka, Ed Culberson, Helge Pedersen, Steve and Debra Attwood, Tabitha Estabrook, and Jim Rogers. Others I'm still waiting to meet: Robert Fulton, Bernd Tesch, and, of course, Ted Simon, author of "Jupiter's Travels," the hauntingly beautiful book that is largely responsible for propelling me away from a secure life toward a most insecure future.
But these riders can't really tell me how to make this ride, much less do the riding for me. They can tell me only what they've done. So I hear their words and I read them and I try to absorb the basic teachings. I don't know what else to do. After the dreaming and the planning, what remains is that which has been there from the beginning: The miles.
So now I will start the trip. Long enough in the tooth to appreciate the downside risks, still limber enough to sit on a bike for the better part of 60,000 miles, and brazen enough to have translated 20 years of courtroom appearances into a decent retirement fund, I can do it. I believe I can withstand the parts of the trip that will be anything but the idle, romantic notion that drove me to this desperate journey in the first place. I hope.
I have no illusions about this. After close to 400,000 miles of motorcycling, I know as well as other riders, deny it though they may, that the sport is principally about pain and survival. Occasionally it can be magical. Mostly it's not. And global travel is worse.
It's about surly bureaucrats and unrecognizable languages and bacteria-infested water and red-eyed thieves and bad advice and pot- holed roads and filth and uncertain telephone service and eye-popping infant mortality rates and primitive sewage systems and starvation and armies of cockroaches and diseases that don't even have Western names yet.
And that's before I leave my house in the District of Columbia.
Still, I think of the exotic places and how much I have wanted to see them for so long. A few weeks ago Marcus Grave, a neighbor of Bernd Tesch in Aachen, Germany, sent me an internet note. He invited me to attend Tesch's Globetrotter rally in Germany next March. The weather was grim there this year, and the mud was up to the axles of the 300 or so bikes that were present. They camped out in snow in a frozen forest. Six of those present --- in as tough a bike crowd as you can find, just one rider in fifty --- had circumnavigated the earth.
And one of them was Ted Simon. He said he'd be back next year. While it is almost never wise to meet an author whom one admires, in Simon's case I think I'll make an exception. I'm hoping that one day we will have something in common.
Here I come, Ted. Aachen or bust.
© 1995, Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois
Please respect our intellectual property rights. Do not distribute any of these documents, or portions therein, without the written permission of Robert Higdon or the Iron Butt Association.
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