We love to get on our bike, two up, and head out for months at a time, a tent and sleeping bags in our panniers, a swimsuit and warm polar fleece in a sack. Long rides take on a life of their own. Your body adjusts, seizes up, loosens up, and your mind expands with every horizon. Although you may be a long way from home, you are never alone – the fellowship of riders and travellers who dream of riding is with you all the way. Humming along every back road that catches our attention is addictive. Our ride from Vancouver, B.C., to Key West, Florida, in January through March 2009 was just an appetizer. In July 2010, we traded in our Yamaha FZ6 for a BMW R1200RT and began the second course, riding from Vancouver Island and heading east to weave our way along the Canada–U.S. border. Our goal was to see the northern states, Ontario, Quebec, the Maritime Provinces and some of the Atlantic states, and then be home before the high mountain passes got too icy in October.

We ran through forest fires and temperatures of 104°F in Wenatchee, Washington, and shivered in the chill of an Atlantic storm on the Cabot Trail, Nova Scotia. In the Maritimes, we tented on the edge of some of the most glorious scenery, where a $20 bill bought us ringside seats to an unrivalled panorama of water and sky. In the Midwest, we pitched our tent sandwiched between a substation and a rail yard. In a ride that crossed back and forth between Canada and the United States, we met with old friends and made new ones.

Like seasoning in the stew, it’s the people met on the roadside who provide the flavour of each journey. Although some travellers have no idea why you’d like to be out, day after day, in all weathers, we were also surrounded by those who understood. There are estimated to be over 7,000,000 motorcyclists in the United States alone. At every gas station stop and diner, the BMW drew comment, and the farther we got from home, the more people would come up to us and share their stories of the long ride that defined their dreams and their lives. You can’t guess a biker by appearance. In one roadside diner, we sat in a booth next to an older couple – the wife was a tiny woman recovering from a stroke and using a walker to manoeuvre the aisle. Her proud husband told us of their biking days, and how one day she’d stalled her bike on a hill and laid it down. “By the time I got there, she had it up and running. I’ll never know how she did it,” he said. “That bike weighed twice as much as she did.”

In North Bend, Nebraska, we met a man who told us the classic story of a cultural gap between Americans and Canadians. In the 1980s, he was riding to the Arctic Circle and he met a group of Canadians to ride with. They set a rendezvous point and a speed limit of 100. “I never even thought of kilometres,” he said ruefully. “I was killing myself trying to lead at 100 miles an hour, and I finally had to stop. I was shaking with exhaustion and had to admit defeat, and they all just thought I crazy to be going that fast.” Ride safe, the universal wish of all bikers, went with us at every departure.

We pitched our tent in the community park in Berthold, North Dakota, facing rows of oil workers’ RVs. The Bakken Formation is an oil-rich portion of the Williston Basin that covers 200,000 square miles in Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. The area was hopping with industry. But oil was not the only power source in the area. At Rugby, North Dakota, the geographical centre of the continent, we turned north on U.S. 3 toward Canada… read more

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Story and photos by Bob and Brenda Timbers