On the seventh of September, 2021, two of us rode out of Austin with a route, a considerable amount of preparation, and very little real sense of what a journey of this length would entail.
Justin had ridden from Houston to Austin. We prepared to depart and then sat at the kitchen table with the motorcycles loaded in the driveway. We seemed to find reasons not to stand up and hit the road. We had planned the trip for months, but we were still uneasy because we had never done anything remotely like this. Aimee watched us stall for a while and eventually pushed us out the door.
It took two days of hard Texas heat to reach country that felt like the trip we were hoping for. By the third day we were in Colorado, riding the Million Dollar Highway between Silverton and Ouray, which remains one of the finest roads either of us has ever ridden. We spent a rest day in Denver, crossed Trail Ridge Road and the Utah line, and collected a third rider in Idaho Falls — Jerry, who had purchased a motorcycle in Bozeman three days earlier for the express purpose of joining us. In Washington we climbed into the North Cascades on Highway 20 and met weather none of us had experienced: sleet, standing water, and the outer edge of a bomb cyclone. Then we rode north to the Canadian border, turned around, and left three motorcycles in a storage unit near the Seattle airport so that they would be waiting for whatever came next.
Colorado was the high point and Washington the low one, and both are worth having. The more durable thing is simpler: three friends covered three thousand miles together and enjoyed every part of it, including the parts that were miserable at the time. That is the difference between a trip and the beginning of something special.
