I had been riding motorcycles for most of my life by 2013. Florida roads, dirt bikes, motocross, plenty of miles close to home. But touring was still new territory. In July 2012, I bought my first touring bike. My brother started calling it Big Red, and the name never really went away.
A year later, I decided to point it north and take my first solo motorcycle road trip into the Appalachian Mountains. It is hard to imagine now, but I was genuinely nervous about it. Somehow, leaving Orlando alone and riding all the way into the mountains felt almost insurmountable. I had gear for local riding, but not much that I would now consider touring gear. I had a rain suit, a leather jacket, blue jeans, simple gloves, construction boots and a half helmet. There were no helmet communications and no navigation system. I carried paper maps and, when I needed more detail, I pulled over and looked at my phone. Even getting out of town became an ordeal. Earlier that week I had put Big Red in for service and asked the dealer to install a new Harley Davidson Daymaker LED headlight before the trip.
The bike was supposed to be ready Friday afternoon. It wasn't. Saturday morning came and went, and it still wasn't ready. I do not remember the exact time they finally called, but it was sometime after lunch. By the time I picked up the bike, got home, packed everything and was actually ready to leave, it was probably five or six o'clock. I almost stayed home. I remember thinking that maybe the whole thing was becoming more trouble than it was worth. But eventually I made myself get on the bike. Just keep going. So I did. By the time I was north of Daytona Beach, darkness was settling in, and I discovered that my brand new headlight was aimed almost entirely at the sky. I had essentially no useful light on the pavement in front of me.
I made my way to a Love's truck stop near Ormond Beach and pulled out the Harley toolkit, hoping I could adjust it. I could not. So I went inside, bought the tools I needed, came back out into the parking lot and figured out how to aim the headlight where it belonged. Once again I thought about turning around. At that point it was easy to interpret everything as an omen. The delayed motorcycle. The late start. The badly aimed headlight. But the answer in my head was the same. Just keep going. By the time I was approaching Savannah, it was raining. I stopped to put on the rain suit, looked at the dark road ahead and finally decided I had done enough for one night. I found a hotel and told myself I would see how I felt in the morning. The next morning I came remarkably close to riding home. It was drizzling outside. Everything looked gray. I remember thinking, This is miserable. This really isn't much fun. But I put the rain suit back on, loaded the bike and continued north. Then something changed. By the time I left I-95 and made my way onto I-26, the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. I pulled over and took off the rain suit. Now it was just the leather jacket, blue jeans, half helmet, gloves and boots. Big Red's stereo was playing. The road began to rise. Slowly, the flat landscape gave way to foothills. The air changed. The scenery changed. The road started bending through terrain that looked nothing like home. The weather had cleared, the music was playing, and the mountains were beginning to appear ahead of me. And somewhere along I-26, all of the anxiety simply disappeared. I remember realizing that I had found something. I was hooked. Looking back now, it is easy to underestimate what a big step that trip was. There was no long history of cross-country motorcycle travel behind me yet, no collection of 10,000-mile trips and no routine built around waking up somewhere unfamiliar, loading the bike and deciding where the road would go next. This was the beginning of that. The first thing I remember about those mountains is how different everything felt from Florida. Roads began climbing and bending. The horizon stopped being flat. Small places along the road suddenly felt like destinations simply because I had never been there before. One of those stops was Duncan's Bar B Que, tucked beneath the mountains. I ate outside beside the river, a barbecue sandwich and beans on a tray while the water moved past a few feet away.
It wasn't anything elaborate, and that was part of what made it memorable. On a motorcycle trip, a simple lunch beside a mountain stream can become one of the moments you remember years later. Fuel stops became part of the rhythm too.
At that point I was still learning what a touring day felt like. Big Red was no longer just something I rode around home. It was becoming a way to reach places I had previously known only from maps and photographs. Later that afternoon I reached an overlook at Funnel Top.
Big Red sat beside the elevation sign with ridge after ridge disappearing into the distance behind it.
That photograph may capture the trip better than any other. I had ridden there myself. It seems like a small distinction until you experience it for the first time. Nobody had led me there. There was no group itinerary to follow. I had left Florida on a motorcycle, nearly turned around more than once, and was now standing at a mountain overlook hundreds of miles from the roads where I had spent most of my riding life. The next day carried me deeper into the kind of riding that would eventually become a major part of my life. That day brought me to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
From there, the roads climbed through forest and opened onto overlooks with views that seemed to stretch farther at every stop.
Some photographs from a trip matter because they document a particular place. Others simply remind you how the day felt. One of my favorites from this trip is a mountain view framed by trees, clouds hanging over the ridges in the distance.
There is no motorcycle in the foreground and no sign telling you where the photograph was taken.
It is simply the Appalachians as I saw them that morning. By early afternoon, the bike and the landscape had started to look like they belonged together.
At another overlook, Big Red filled the foreground while the mountains rolled away behind it.
Years later, I would ride motorcycles through mountain ranges all over North America. At the time, none of that had happened yet. This was still discovery. The day eventually brought me to the Cherohala Skyway, another name that would become familiar in later years but was still new to me then.
I stopped, took the obligatory photograph of the motorcycle beneath the sign and continued riding.
I could not have known it in September 2013, but this trip changed the scale of motorcycling for me. Until then, motorcycles had been something I had ridden for decades. After this trip, they became a way to travel. There is a difference. The Appalachian Mountains were close enough to Florida to make that first solo trip possible, but far enough away to show me what was waiting beyond home. One successful ride made another seem possible. Then a longer one. Then farther west. Eventually the motorcycle trips grew into journeys measured in thousands of miles rather than hundreds. But all of that came later. In 2013, it was simply Big Red, a late start, a headlight pointed at the sky, rain near Savannah, paper maps, a half helmet, barbecue beside a river, unfamiliar mountain roads, and one instruction I kept giving myself whenever turning around seemed easier. Just keep going. I did. And somewhere in those foothills, I knew I would keep going for a very long time.