This one started in three places at once.
Ray flew to Chicago on Friday the third of October, 2025, and collected the motorcycle from the unit near O'Hare where it had sat since August. The same morning, thirteen hundred miles south, Jerry and Danny Gertson left East Bernard on two more bikes with Toronto as the meeting point. Aimee and Robin would fly in on the Monday. Nobody would be in the same place until day four.
Ray's four days alone were the best riding of the trip and he knew it at the time. Up the Lake Michigan shore through the resort towns and the dunes to Traverse City; then the Tunnel of the Trees, the Straits of Mackinac, and all the way back down the Lake Huron side; then round the Thumb and over the Blue Water Bridge into Ontario. The whole outline of a state in three days, which is a thing you can only do with Michigan.
Everybody converged on Toronto on the Monday evening — Jerry and Danny off US interstates by way of Little Rock, Indianapolis and London, Aimee and Robin off an aeroplane. The next morning the whole group rode south to Niagara Falls, which Ray had never seen, and then turned round and rode the length of Lake Ontario to Kingston in the hardest rain of any trip the club has taken. Three hundred and twenty-eight miles, most of them wet, and two pillion passengers who had been in the country for about fourteen hours.
Danny turned for Texas from Niagara. It had been his first long ride and there were commitments at home, and he went back the way he had come, alone.
After that the trip changed gear entirely. Kingston to Montreal on back roads along the St. Lawrence, a rest day walking around Montreal with the bikes in a parking garage, then the old road up the north bank to Quebec City, a morning in the walled town, and south over the border into Maine along the Kennebec. Wiscasset for lobster, Freeport for L.L.Bean, and Portland.
It came apart the way they all do. Aimee flew home on the Monday morning; the other three rode back out to Freeport and put Jerry's bike into a rented unit that afternoon. Jerry and Robin left early on the Tuesday. Ray had his own bike serviced at the Harley dealer so it would be ready for whatever comes next, shut it in beside Jerry's, and flew to Austin that evening.
Two thousand one hundred and twenty-four miles, six states and provinces, and the first time the club has ridden in Canada rather than up to the edge of it and turned round.
