Every trip before this one had at least two motorcycles on it. This one had one, and Ray rode it out of Austin on Sunday the twenty-seventh of July, 2025, by himself. Justin had done something comparable on his own after the second trip — flying to Las Vegas and riding his bike home inside a day — but that never got a number, so this is the first solo trip in the archive.
It had three purposes, which is two more than most trips manage. The motorcycle needed to be further north than Texas for whatever came next. A business we were looking at buying had locations in Chicago that somebody had to go and see. And the National Sports Collectors Convention happened to be in Chicago the same week. One trip settled all three.
The riding was accordingly unsentimental: three days, mostly interstate, no detours. Austin to Little Rock by way of Dallas, Little Rock to St. Louis on US 67 through the eastern edge of the Ozarks, and St. Louis to Chicago on what is, mile for mile, the northern half of Route 66 — although at seventy-five miles an hour with an appointment to keep, that is a fact rather than an experience.
Chicago took the rest of the week. The bike stopped being transport between cities and became transport around one, carrying Ray to the business locations and out to the show for five days.
On Sunday the third of August it went into a storage unit not far from O'Hare and Ray flew home. That is the fourth time the club has finished a trip by leaving a motorcycle at the far end of it, and the first time the far end was a city rather than somebody's garage.
There are no photographs from this trip yet. The picture on its card is a stock photograph of Chicago rather than one of ours.
