Tours

Nov/Dec '07 Premium Content

Scotland

"Glenlivet it has castles three,/ Drumin, Blairfindy and Deskie,/ And also one distillery,/More famous than the castles three!" It's not Glenlivet we're visiting on our Edelweiss Royal Tour of Scotland, but tiny Cardhu in the village of Knockando on the River Spey. The

Nov/Dec '07 Premium Content

Canada: New Brunswick

Our crossing from Maine into New Brunswick was quick and easy. We only had to stop long enough to answer one question: "Do you have any alcohol with you?" We had some wine and beer on board, but since the tight spaces on motorcycles are seldom thought to

Nov/Dec '07 Premium Content

Long Island Scooter Tour

Long Island, in geological time, was born yesterday. Glaciers that created this 120-mile long, fish-shaped pile of rock and sand began retreating some 22,000 years ago. Sea levels rose in concert with the thaw, completely encircling the land mass 11,000 years later. Today, it's one of

Sep/Oct '07 Premium Content

Mountain Magic

As many people live in California as in the whole of Canada, so you'd expect the state to be pretty crowded. And around the major conurbations that's certainly true. But much of the Golden State's northern territory is wild, mountainous, thinly populated, and etched

Sep/Oct '07 Premium Content

Shamrock Tour® - Tupelo, Mississippi

Yesterday's soupy clouds have dissolved in Mississippi blues. Nearby, two boys playing tag dart past, disappearing around a signal corner  -  one side of the shotgun shack in which Elvis Aaron Presley entered this world on January 8, 1935. As their shouting fades the sound of rustling leaves

Sep/Oct '07 Premium Content

Along the Trans-America Trail

When we landed this assignment, I couldn't have told you why taking a trip across America on the "worst" possible roads sounded so appealing. Maybe it's because off-road riding doesn't even exist back home, in densely populated Germany. Or perhaps it'

Sep/Oct '07 Premium Content

Kansas

For motorcyclists, tours on mountain roads have their obvious joys: there's beauty in the scenery and passion in the pavement. When you're riding the serpentines of twisty highways and climbing through passes, every moment on a bike is unavoidably invigorating. But having toured so many mountain

Sep/Oct '07 Premium Content

Eastern Europe: For the Children of Chernobyl

With the dissolution of that old ideological barrier known as the Iron Curtain, travel restrictions have eased and Western bikers now enjoy much greater access to the roads in Eastern Europe. Even so, a tour of Ukraine and Belarus doesn't yet qualify as a care-free adventure, especially when

Sep/Oct '07 Premium Content

Canada: Nova Scotia, A Seaside Sojourn in the Maritimes

I have traveled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes, the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all! -  Alexander Graham Bell Just entering Nova Scotia, where that great inventor of telecommunications lived for 30 years,

Sep/Oct '07 Premium Content

British Columbia's Hot Springs

When explorer David Thompson of the Northwest Company was mapping the Columbia River in 1811, he liked nothing better at the end of a hard day's travel than to relax in one of the many hot springs lining his route in what was later to become British Columbia.

Jul/Aug '07 Premium Content

Part II: New York Waterways

In 1808, while still mayor of New York City, De Witt Clinton began championing a grand vision: a system of canals providing the first all-water commercial shipping link from western New York and the Great Lakes to New York City, and from there to the rest of the world. At

Jul/Aug '07 Premium Content

Canada to Mexico - Off-Road Excerpts

If you're up for it, this rugged, cross-country adventure could be the trip of a lifetime. Roaming from spectacular valleys where antelope caper to high plateaus where wild horses still run, we crossed river rapids and deserts and the undisturbed wilds of the western ranges. We stirred up

Jul/Aug '07 Premium Content

The Great Ocean Road

I love Aussie meat pies. Like Vegemite, they're a staple in the Australian diet. But I also discovered recently from Food Standards Australia New Zealand that the ubiquitous pie may contain any of the following: beef, buffalo, camel, cattle, deer, goat, hare, pig, poultry, rabbit, sheep and/or

Jul/Aug '07 Premium Content

The Colors of Guatemala

When last we heard from them in the tropics, our world travelers Ramona Eichhorn and Uwe Krauss had crossed Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras on their KTM 640 Adventures. They now take us into Guatemala to explore the Mayan heartland of Central America. Tikal The road curves from the

Jul/Aug '07 Premium Content

Iowa River Tour: Beside the Big Muddy

The Ojibwe people called it "Missi Sippi," Great River, and perhaps no other geographical feature has been traveled on, along, and written about more than this one. Samuel Clemens, using the pen name Mark Twain, turned the Mississippi River into a living entity, untamed, unforgiving, and yet harmoniously

Jul/Aug '07 Premium Content

Shamrock Tour® - Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Without warning, the clock radio fires a loathsome pop song wreathed in static across the room, piercing my harmonious dream state like a perfectly targeted broadhead arrow burying itself in a dusty hay bale. "Oh Britney, you're frighteningly 'Toxic' at 7:00." But thankfully,

May/Jun '07 Premium Content

Part I: New York Waterways

The last glacial period in upstate New York left behind a lush landscape of rivers, lakes, gorges, waterfalls, and fertile land. Navigable waterways instrumental to exploration of the area by pre-colonial Europeans took on strategic importance as France and England laid claim to the territory. Forts were built and armies

May/Jun '07 Premium Content

Shamrock Tour® - Boise, Idaho

Departing from the heart of Idaho's capital city of Boise, you can be riding the open road in about 10 minutes. Since the state's principal claim to fame is its potatoes, you might expect to find yourself among potato plants. But those farms are elsewhere. You&

May/Jun '07 Premium Content

Texas: Wandering the Wide Open Spaces

As I spur the big Heritage Softail® west out of Abilene, the light mid-morning traffic allows me to take an earnest survey of the immensity unfolding in every direction. Only smatterings of manmade structures and distant clumps of trees mar a limitless horizon that wouldn't budge the bubble

May/Jun '07 Premium Content

Washington: In the Horse Heaven Hills

If you've never heard of Bickleton, Washington, don't feel bad; you're not alone. Little more than a general store, a tavern, and a 90-student K-12 school, the town lazily straddles a quiet county road (the grandly named Bickleton Highway) in the baked brown hills

May/Jun '07 Premium Content

Canada: British Columbia, Coast to Cariboo

"Ho-hum," a friend of mine remarked, tongue-in-cheek, as we stood looking across British Columbia's vast Shuswap Lake, "just more mountains, forests, rivers and lakes." Well, for once, he was right. Southern BC is mostly forests, rivers, lakes and mountains. And as motorcyclists know, these

May/Jun '07 Premium Content

Turkey: Scenic, Safe and Sensational

There is much to be said for seeing Turkey on a motorcycle. The roads, ease of traveling from the U.S., the unequalled historic and archeological wonders, and the excellent hotels and restaurants make it as convenient as touring in Europe. But the best reason for coming here is to

May/Jun '07 Premium Content

Canada: Newfoundland - To Terra Nova

We couldn't recognize much of what the attendant was saying as English, nor did we understand him when he smiled and rattled off a rapid-fire warning, "Yobettagedyoassoutofhere!" But we quickly got the message as the big truck approached. The man's dialect, we later learned,

Mar/Apr '07 Premium Content

Cruising Nevada's Lonely Roads

For a brief 18-month period between April 1860 and November 1861, the east-west route across central Nevada was the busiest it had ever been. Spurred by the looming civil war, California Senator William M. Gwinn proposed a fast mail service from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, provided the mail could

Mar/Apr '07 Premium Content

Shamrock Tour® - Glens Falls, New York

The curves up the mountain are so tight that you are just peripherally aware of the rock alternating with the forested ravine, first left, then right; you're going so fast, you strain not to bang into the one or go sliding down the other. Your riding companion'