Tours

Sep/Oct '06 Premium Content

Canada: Call of the Yukon - Part Two

It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder, It's the forests where silence has lease; It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It's the stillness that fills me with peace. -  Robert Service Around the midpoint of the Second

Sep/Oct '06 Premium Content

Basic Bolivia

"Welcome to Coca Country" could well be the most fitting name for the Bolivian exhibition hall at the next World's Fair or maybe for some future installation at Six Flags over South America. Admittedly provocative (unless the soft-drink giant underwrites its construction), nevertheless the hall might

Jul/Aug '06 Premium Content

Moab to Los Angeles: Mother Lode of the Mother Road

Monument Valley, that dreamy, spiritual, red-rock vista so lovingly exploited by automobile ad directors must indeed be an impressive sight at sunrise or sunset, when the warm light and strong shadows etch its soaring spires and buttes against the sky. But under the cover of high clouds on a hazy,

Jul/Aug '06 Premium Content

Shamrock Tour® - Grand Rapids, Minnesota

My first view of Mille Lacs Lake is an impressive one indeed. The bright midmorning sun is laying a shimmer across the wind-blown surface, creating a near blinding electric caper of refracted light that, even in broad daylight, puts the Vegas strip to shame. Another half-mile of asphalt passes beneath

Jul/Aug '06 Premium Content

Roundtrip Tour: Circling Pittsburgh

The bar in the sports-crazy college town of Morgantown, home to West Virginia University, had one of their televisions tuned, oddly enough, to the Weather Channel. Gnawing away at the wing of some unlucky flightless fowl and sipping from a stein of suds, I found myself paying more attention to

Jul/Aug '06 Premium Content

New Hampshire's White Mountains

Leaf-peeping in New England is serious business. Each autumn, as the days and nights shift from warm to cool and memories of days spent lazing on the beach in light summer outfits become as fuzzy as sweaters pulled out of storage, people from across the country and around the world

Jul/Aug '06 Premium Content

Florida Scooter Tour

In the grand scheme of things, February in North Carolina is not all that bad. We could ride year round, but few of us choose to do so. Our long, hot summers condition us to opt for the extra two wheels once the leaves take leave. Sure, the daytime highs

Jul/Aug '06 Premium Content

Canada: Call of the Yukon - Part One

One of three roads in the world to penetrate the Arctic Circle, the daunting Dempster Highway runs from Dawson City to Inuvik. On its scenic way, the road skirts the Tombstone Range, travels through First Nation towns, and traverses the Peel and Mackenzie Rivers on ice bridges (ferries in summer)

Jul/Aug '06 Premium Content

Northern Chile and Argentina: High and Dry

Summer was running out of gas. Yellow leaves fell gently, and autumn nipped at the air when we left behind the vineyards and fruit plantations north of Santiago on our trip to Mendoza, in Argentina. Like ghost riders, it felt as if we were heading straight into the sky. An

May/Jun '06 Premium Content

Summer Splendor in SE Massachusetts

In the summer, Cape Cod becomes the crown jewel of eastern Massachusetts. While the Berkshires in the western half of the Bay State lure vacationers and weekenders with its rolling hills and famed classical music performances, the siren song of the beaches and other shoreline attractions of the Cape prove

May/Jun '06 Premium Content

Shamrock Tour® - Austin, Texas

It must be after one o'clock. I can tell because the hunger pangs are starting to hit with a consistency matched only by the Heritage Softail's staccato, V-twin thump ricocheting off the warm Texas asphalt. According to a friendly reader I met at the Fort Worth

May/Jun '06 Premium Content

Scooter Tour: Goin' Down Jersey

"New Jersey, Come See For Yourself" is the official slogan recently selected to encourage tourism in the Garden State, and Down Jersey, that mostly rural portion of southern New Jersey bordering the Delaware Bay, is certainly what the current crop of boosters have in mind. A land of

May/Jun '06 Premium Content

Minnesota and N. Dakota - Classic Byways: Highway 52

We've enjoyed our few days of rest in Rochester, but the lure of the highway cannot be denied. Unable to resist, we leave the city behind and again plunge into the sea of greens and golds we've come to know as Midwest farmland. Drifting lazily along

May/Jun '06 Premium Content

Southeastern Indiana

If you are looking for roads that wind through fantastic, hilly scenery and want to encounter a little history every few miles or so, then start making plans to ride in southeastern Indiana. You'll find Native American trails, the route of Indiana's only major Civil War

May/Jun '06 Premium Content

France: En Provence

The weather in Provence, a region comprising some five départements in the southeast corner of France, is near perfect in spring and autumn, with mainly clear skies and temperatures in the mid-seventies. It's a land of scarlet poppies growing wild by the thousands, church bells ringing out from

May/Jun '06 Premium Content

Exploring Chile's Wild and Rugged South

Off-road heaven has a name  -  Chile. Twenty-seven hundred miles long, this very narrow stretch of land between the Andes and the rugged Pacific coast is one of the most multifaceted countries we have ever seen. In stark contrast to its arid northern reaches Chilean Patagonia offers all the dramatic

Mar/Apr '06 Premium Content

Virginia: Spirit Roads and Ghosts In Grey

Have you ever been somewhere that seems to speak to you? You know, a special place that feels so comfortable and so right that you can't help but feel you belong there. Staying away is impossible and with each return the mystical region's sweet refrains strengthen

Mar/Apr '06 Premium Content

Shamrock Tour® - North-eastern Vermont and Quebec Province

Locals call it "Vermonter's Vermont" and the Northeast Kingdom (a term coined in the nineteen forties by US Senator George Aiken). The most remote and most beautiful part of the Green Mountain State, the Kingdom has successfully dodged the massive tourist development that's entrenched

Mar/Apr '06 Premium Content

Crop Country & Chicago Skyscrapers

Cincinnati's morning traffic pattern is no different from any other large city. Dive in headfirst or stay out of the way, the choice is yours. Luckily, we have the luxury of exercising the latter. After lingering over coffee and giving the rush-hour loonies time to find their assigned

Mar/Apr '06 Premium Content

Viva Las Vegas

Las Vegas. The Strip. The showgirls. The strippers. Las Vegas. Sequins. Sin. Sex. Céline. Las Vegas. Glitz. Glamour. Dan Tanna. Las Vegas. Neon and Newton. Penn & Teller. Tigers and sharks... This pioneer town has had its share of ups and downs, from one incarnation as the mid-twentieth-century, mob-manipulated, Rat

Mar/Apr '06 Premium Content

North Carolina: Slow Down, Look Around

We never stopped at South of the Border when I was a kid. Dad was one of those psycho travelers. Bladders could be emptied only when fuel tanks were filled. Motels were always dark places and I only saw them during midnight check-ins and pre-dawn check-outs. Mom was sympathetic about

Mar/Apr '06 Premium Content

South Argentina: A Journey into Patagonia

The view from the plane was breathtaking: a seemingly infinite range of sharp, snowy summits stretched toward the earth's curve, among them the magnificence of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas. Farther east, the land abruptly flattens out, revealing the vast, fertile expanses of the pampas, the

Mar/Apr '06 Premium Content

UK: Going Coastal in Southern England

"Dear little Bognor" is how Queen Victoria referred to this Sussex seaside town, which later awarded itself the suffix Regis ("of the King") after George V convalesced there in 1928. But he mustn't have enjoyed his stay very much. In 1935, he lay dying

Jan/Feb '06 Premium Content

Southwest New Mexico

Silver City - Las Cruces (186 miles) Our morning ride begins in Silver City on 15, an extremely scenic, single-lane road that heads to the Gila Hot Springs. Backtracking some to 35, meandering south along a green valley, we take a left on 152 to race over one of the

Jan/Feb '06 Premium Content

Shamrock Tour® - Moab, Utah

"Ya gotta see the petroglyphs on the road to Potash," says my new best friend, as he hands me a bottle of Black Butte Porter. The affable Floridian, also staying at the Adventure Inn, is making his annual trek to the Canyonlands. Next morning, I'm standing