#RoadTrip

Cristina has been around powersports her entire life. Motorcycles, four-wheelers, UTVs, etc. She grew up in a family where she watched her father and his brothers grow their motorcycle business from a small shop shipping Harley-Davidsons overseas, to three multi-line dealerships and a parts distribution business that supplies over 3,000 independent shops with OEM parts.

If you think watching movies with subtitles makes you smarter, here’s a road trip video from Lip Productions located in Prague. In their own translated-to-English words; Howl Seat – crazy motorcycle road movie from ocean to snow. “Take a Holiday. Tight the screws on your motorcycle. Grabe your friends and set off for an adventure. We dreamed about visiting French town Biarritz for a long time, once a year is this town full of amazing people, manually adjusted bikes, surfers, music and full of unconventional culture associated with Cafe Racers. From Biarritz we continued right to the Spanish desert or to snowy Alps. We wanted to get know and see as much as possible, and we also managed it. The whole trip was captured and here it comes!”

This is merely my subjective list of 10 good things, but there are really no bad things about riding those few hundred miles from MO’s SoCal headquarters to the Monterey peninsula; blasting over a few mountain ranges, making time up the spine, toasting the coast. Mother Nature pulled out all the stops in the scenery department, the weather’s perfect, we wangled six great bikes (more on them next week). The fact that it’s a World Superbike and MotoAmerica race weekend is really just a bonus.

Whenever former staffer, and now MO contributor and guest columnist, Gabe Ets-Hokin, talks about bromances, as he did in his recent Skidmarks column, further investigation is needed. In his column, Gabe talks about his first time meeting Lee Parks, forming an instant bond with the riding skills master. Buried in that column is a link to this magical experience Gabe had riding motorcycles in Lee’s front yard, then shooting guns in the back. This story from 2005 was too good to let rest in a hyperlink in a column, so for this week’s Church feature we’re re-publishing it in all its glory. 

Ah, Tennessee, my favorite state. There was something about crossing the border into The Volunteer State that melted the stress of Virginia away and put me into the motorcycle zen I knew this trip was about. With the second episode out and the team in a good routine of riding and shooting, the relatively minuscule problems related to a trip like this became faint memories.

Our second segment in the trip is the Virginias. We were met with an idyllic American farmer landscape of rolling hills tattooed with freshly paved curves that lasted for miles. Although we had little traffic to interfere with the ride, the twists and turns proved to be both a mental and physical exercise for the motorcycle muscles, not to mention the first crash of the trip.

This is the first installment of “Escape the Apple,” an idea hatched by Eric Guidice who, at 28, decided he needed to take an epic motorcycle road trip to disengage from the drudgery of normal life. Click this link to read the setup to this nine-part series that will be seen on Motorcycle.com.