11,500-mile Moped Journey

May 18, 2004 5:10 PM

"In the summer of 1978 I undertook a 3-month 11,500-mile journey by moped from Toronto to Alaska (USA) and back to Toronto. This website contains a complete travelogue of this trip, with over 300 photographs and a description of the trip, plus technical information about the moped and details of the trip."
posted by stbalbach (15 comments total)

I wish I had the time to do something like this.
posted by Hackworth at 5:26 PM on May 18, 2004

the dempster is incredible. i have yet to go on it, but it looms out there as a FUTURE VENTURE. his pictures are very informative. i have put a lot of thought into taking the dempster at some point in my life. no idea if that will ever happen. my friend did it last winter. haven't heard from him since it was over. i wonder what's changed.
posted by oog at 5:32 PM on May 18, 2004

We all have the time to do stuff like this. Time is free. We've chosen to do different things with our time, or entered into commitments we're unwilling to break, such as to our business partners or family. That's why it's good advice to do stuff like this while you're young. Then you have no obstacles except things like saving up some money, planning, working up the nerve to quit your job and tell your parents, etc.
posted by crunchburger at 5:42 PM on May 18, 2004

I'm going to perform a cardinal MeFi sin here, and (gasp!) self link... My wife and I did the Dempster in '96, in our 1970 VW bus. Took us something like 8 weeks round trip from Austin TX, and it was a helluva run. Better yet, the portion from Vancouver to Inuvik and back was a group run by a bunch of other nutty VWers (about 13 busses IIRC). We'd all met online in a VW Bus mailing list, and prior to the trip only 2-3 folks had met in meatspace. 'Twas a helluva lot of fun.
posted by ehintz at 5:44 PM on May 18, 2004

Refreshing site. Thanks.
posted by cmacleod at 6:11 PM on May 18, 2004

General riding & traveling notes
Get used to being stared at. A fully laden moped traveling along the highway is an unusual sight, and it does attract attention. Most people are just simply curious. However, there is a certain proportion of the population who like to ridicule you for riding a moped. Some people will laugh and point. It is perceived by some as being "sissy" and not a "man's bike". All nonsense, of course, but this stuff does come at you.

I really like this guy.
posted by letitrain at 7:40 PM on May 18, 2004

Amazing stuff, and very informative, but he left unanswered perhaps the most pressing question: What about bears?

He mentions seeing three Grizzly bears while heading up into the Arctic (Intuik?) -- what in the hell did he do while camping in his little tent? I didn't see any mention of a bear suit, nor mention of intense hand-to-bear combat training.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:07 PM on May 18, 2004

Makes me wonder what those pictures would look like, if they had been shot today.
posted by tonelesscereal at 9:15 PM on May 18, 2004

Another time, another woman.

It was not the time, back in the early 90's, when I'd had a brief, searing vision that I think of still, the vision that George Bush Sr. had ordered the 82nd Airborne to airdrop in and quietly surround the Rainbow Gathering to "clean up those damn hippies" - and it seems also now - with hindsight - that my troubled vision was both displaced in time and that it confused the father for the son and the lesser political target, hippies and radical nonconformists, for the greater.

No, it was another time - an earlier time and an earlier trip down to a gathering in S. Carolina made during those days when I worked with retarded clients and would bring Ron back to the warehouse I lived at so we could drink beer and listen to music.

Ron had been confined for most of his life - up until his release from the state facility - in a small box or cage so that his limbs were abnormally skinny, as if he were a Fakir. He had developed a Fakir's extraordinary flexibility, even, and could put his feet behind his ears with ease. An aesthete, a man of no words but possessed of a sensory vocabulary wholly his own, Ron would express this by a range of self-stimulatory techniques such as rapping his knuckles on a table and holding them then up to his ear - as one would a tuning fork - in the sort of deep meditative reverie which he otherwise reserved for beer-drinking.

Oh yes, we - my other two warehouse mates and I - all lived together in a huge open warehouse space flanked by three tiny bedrooms, worked at the same facility, and minded Ron - so we would all bring him home to hang out, amidst the bachelor mess made sublime through the graces of a midsized tropical tortoise that ranged about on the floor at will. Ron would drink beer slowly and with great concentration - he relished every sip (and who were we to deprive him - an adult who had suffered much already) - and one day, when my mates and I were playing vague music, jamming with random technique and spacey enthusiasm, Ron - though he couldn't walk unassisted - scuttled crab-like across the wooden factory warehouse floor bearing a harmonica. Quick as a cat, he popped it into a hole in the wall. It must have dropped twenty feet. I don't recall either before or since ever witnessing such a decisive but delicately nuanced fuckyou. Noticing the cue, I took him home for dinner.

Yes, it was that time, the time when me and the mates piled into a 70's Olds Cutlass we called "The Cutlet" and drove over a thousand miles south to a Rainbow Gathering, my first. Gypsies were there - with a generator-powered disco - and Hare Krishnas, Deadheads, lovers of all things American Indian, a few actual Indians, and people who lived in horse drawn covered wagons including one built - with a woodworker's loving , precise hand - as a boat on wheels. The Rainbow family.

And we all got dysentery - but before that, I awoke one morning and peeked out our tent door to witness, framed in the morning sun, a slim young woman with long golden hair and dressed all in white - in a later day a hot contender for the acting role of the elf-lady "Galadriel" had "The Lord of the Rings" been turned into a movie twelve or fourteen years earlier - gracefully performing Sun Salutations on a blanket there : beside her tent that she had pitched next to ours, along the winding tent speckled mountain road, in the night.

A hippy chick with an orange VW camper bus bus, she asked me - a day after my dysentery fever broke and a day before before I was to drive back to my life in puritan-encrusted Mass. (and quite casually, I should add) - if I wanted to drive across the US and back with her.

My warehouse mates advised me - "Do. it. I would. You'll only get the chance once." And so I did. They were right on the first count but wrong on the second.

The advice gave me the courage to break a heart I'd been trying to break for months - as I was young, dumb, more than a bit callous, and not so bold. My warehousemates carried the news back with them as with a letter packet wending it's way back from a long sea voyage, to a point far downstream in time and with sorrowful portent : to speak of a changed heart.

Actually it was not my heart, at first, which led me along. Glandular secretions - in young blood coursing through young veins - did that.

So, from South Dakota near the Badlands, on the day I was due back at work, I called my boss to inform him :

"I'm in South Dakota. I guess I won't be back for work."

"Oh," he said. "I guess you won't."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Me too," he agreed.

It was that time, not the other time, and it was a relationship fraught with sadness and trouble, but a certain purity and occasional passion too -

- Such as at an enormous desert dam one scorching afternoon - hot hot hot - along the river that issued from the deep reservoir, slightly warmer than freezing, from the dam's base.

It was over a hundred degrees, dry as bone, and wild goats scampered about the low river ravine as we made our way to a private spot for naked sunbathing and river dipping.

It was not a passionate affair, mostly, but when I came out of the river cold as a popsicle with an erection, and lied down on top of her not expecting anything at all but the contact with her sunbaked body, this touched an unexpected chord.

So we made love, and as we did, an excursion boat rounded the riverbend, drifting lazily by while the boaters waved and cheered.

That was the time : a good moment.
posted by troutfishing at 9:15 PM on May 18, 2004

Oh, but I digress.

I should mention : I see by my outfit

"In 1963, at the age of 24, Peter left behind his home in New York, although not his beautiful Bronx vocabulary, and accompanied by his friend Phil Sigunick set out on an epic journey (on the motorscooters Jenny and Couchette) to San Francisco, where the beautiful Enid awaited her knight in shining roadgear. This is a true story, a patchwork of rememberances pulled together from Peter's (I'm sure) extensive trip notes. A good read overall, the book definitely pulls you into a feeling of "I wish I could do that / had done" etc. etc. (I must admit, part of my soft spot for this book is directly attributable to the fact that I got homesick from the scattered Yiddish and New Yawk references. Fuggedaboutit.) On the way, they interact with a strange selection of their fellow Americans, from the small-town-cops who are always questioning these bearded, disheveled travellers, to the friends and aquaintenances who give them shelter along their route, to the many small-town mechanics whose tools they are constantly borrowing to fix Jenny or Couchette, to the hookers in Las Vegas and the tourists everywhere. Oh, and they pass right through South Park, Colorado!

But the best part is the easy comraderie between Beagle and Sigunick as they make their way across the land. They have many roles that they drop into at the drop of a hat, such as the Lone Ranger and his Indian Sidekick, or the Grizzled Battle Commander and his Weary Yet Loyal Men. My best friend and I were naturally dropping into roles like these five minutes after we had met each other, and still do to this day, although we can't possibly hope to match the repertoire that Beagle and Siggy had going.

If you want a great picture of the United States as seen from its brownstone hotels, highways-with-no-tollbooths, all night diners, and makeshift campsites...

Or if you love a good buddy adventure, a la Bing Crosby and Bob Hope's "Road" Movies...

Or if you're just looking for one of the best-written pieces of literature out there...

Then perhaps you should give I See By My Outfit a whirl.
"
posted by troutfishing at 9:20 PM on May 18, 2004

"I didn't see any mention of a bear suit, nor mention of intense hand-to-bear combat training." - Civil_Disobedient, he must have stopped by a Dairy Queen, for an ice cream sundae, and kept the spoon : which came in handy for digging the nightly defensive perimeter, a 12-foot deep bear trench lined with Punjee-stakes.
posted by troutfishing at 9:25 PM on May 18, 2004

Oh, shit. I killed the thread. I'm sorry.
posted by troutfishing at 9:29 AM on May 19, 2004

Great link, stalbach. Thanks for posting it. Reminds me of how MeFi once was.

(oh, ehintz, I don't think there's any prohibition against self-linking in the comments)
posted by pardonyou? at 10:03 AM on May 19, 2004

stalbach stbalbach
posted by pardonyou? at 10:34 AM on May 19, 2004

Wonderful link stbalbach! He seems like a deep fellow. And such a fitting quote on his homepage:

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. - Richard Bach, Illusions
posted by yoga at 12:58 PM on May 19, 2004