Two Women Riders Receive BMW Mileage Award

According to an article published in Clutch and Chrome, two female motorcyclists have received the million mile award from BMW. Here's an excerpt:

"Travelling epic distances is nothing new to BMW Motorrad adventurers, but while many ride tens, or even hundreds of thousands of miles, two American women have racked up a record few could even contemplate. Enter Ardys Kellerman and Voni Glaves, who are officially recognized as the first female BMW riders in North America to cover one million miles (1.6 million kilometers). The distance, which is more than 40 times the circumference of the globe, took decades to accumulate and between them, the women have used 31 different motorcycles." -- Digits

Read the complete article.

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally - August 8-14, 2011

Each year, hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists head toward what many feel is the motorcycling mecca of the world, Sturgis, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota takes place this year August 8-14.

Check out my article on this great motorcycle rally. See if you can see me waving in the picture when I attended the 1993 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. I really need to go back to this great rally. How about you?

Motorcycle Cannonball Endurance Run - Old Bikes Hit the Road

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, The Motorcycle Cannonball Endurance Run has begun. This is a coast-to-coast run of pre-1916 motorcycles starting from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and ending in Santa Monica, California. Dates for the run are September 10-26, 2010. Check out the Cannonball Run website for everything you might want to know about this historic run. (I've noticed that the website can be slow to load or even produce dreaded Internal Server Errors.)

To give you a flavor for what the bikes look like and sound like and how enthusiastic their riders are, I've listed five videos of interviews with Cannonball riders:

• #44 Jon Szalay - 1911 H-D 7A


• #16 Bill Campbell - 1915 H-D Twin


• #15 Buzz Kanter - 1915 H-D Twin


• #47 Ron Mattson - 1915 Indian F-head V-twin


• #89 Cristine Sommer-Simmons - 1915 H-D 11-J

Keep checking the Cannonball Run website for daily updates. Hopefully, we may see some coverage of this event on TV.

Motorcycle Touring - Take a Long Trip on Your Motorcycle

The dictionary defines a tour as "a journey for business, pleasure or education often involving a series of stops and ending at the starting point." Thus a tour is a complete circuit.

Motorcycle touring has always been a part of motorcycling. Early riders wanted to jump on their motorcycles and ride to see what was over the next hill. Of course the roads weren't too good in those days and travel could be slow. Bill Stermer in his book, Motorcycle Touring and Travel: A Handbook of Travel by Motorcycle, says:

"The bike on which most people choose to tour tends to be the one they own at the time."

This was certainly true early on before the advent of the heavyweight touring motorcycles of the last twenty-five years. The introduction of the Honda Gold Wing has changed all that. Read more.