Kingdom Riders

Wanted to ride for a long time before he allowed himself to. He held a motorcycle licence by the middle of the 2000s and then set the whole idea aside when his first son was born, on the straightforward reasoning that the risk was not his alone to take.

He came back to it around 2020, when his children were grown and that calculation had changed. It began on dirt: a borrowed Kawasaki 140 at his father-in-law's place in Idaho, and then a Yamaha TTR 230 that he rode around his own property until he trusted himself on a bike again. His first street machine was a Yamaha XSR 700, which he rode around Austin through 2020. The Road King followed once it became clear that what he actually wanted was not to ride, but to go somewhere.

TODO(ray): anything you would like to add.

Ray's brother-in-law, and the other half of the decision to buy touring motorcycles in the first place. The two of them researched cruisers together and settled the question by renting a Road King and a Heritage in Las Vegas and swapping between them for the better part of a day. They both went home and bought Road Kings.

He rode in from Houston the night before Trip #1 and was at the kitchen table the following morning when Aimee asked whether anybody was actually leaving.

He is also the only one of the three to have ridden an Iron Butt: when the motorcycles needed collecting from Las Vegas after the West Coast trip, he flew out on his own schedule and rode his home in a single run of more than a thousand miles inside a day, rather than wait for the others.

TODO(ray): Justin in his own words.

A close friend of Ray's for years before either of them discovered that the other rode motorcycles. It came up in conversation a few months before Trip #1, and once Jerry had heard the plan he wanted to be part of it — except that a commitment at home prevented him leaving with the others, and he had no touring motorcycle to leave on.

He solved both problems at once by finding a used 2018 Road King in Bozeman, flying up to buy it, and riding it south to Idaho Falls to join the trip at its halfway point.

TODO(ray): Jerry in his own words.

A friend of Ray's and Jerry's who came along for the first four days of Trip #8, and the first person outside the founding three to ride with the club.

He set out from East Bernard with Jerry on the same morning Ray was collecting his own motorcycle from a storage unit in Chicago, and the two of them covered Texas to Ontario in four days — Little Rock, Indianapolis, London, and then Toronto, where the three bikes finally met. It was, as far as Ray knows, the longest ride Danny had done.

He turned for home from Niagara Falls rather than carry on east, and rode back to Texas on his own.

TODO(ray): Danny's home base, the bike he rode, and anything he would like said about him. A photograph too, if he will sit for one.