F
lying into San Francisco
in May, 2009 I spent two
weeks helping my older
brother prepare to set
sail on the last leg of his
own journey before mak-
ing my way down to the coast of Tex-
as, about 2hrs south-east of Houston
where I picked up the bike (Mavis) do-
nated by Lee Winters.
Lee set sail from Houston and
had left the bike in the care of some
friends, Steven and Lillian, about half
a year ago. The bike hasn’t been on
the road since. My expectations of be-
ing able to jump straight on and ride,
were quashed with an email from Lee.
Thankfully the email was very thor-
ough and detailed as to the idiosyn-
crasies and quirks of ‘Mavis’, but made
me realise that this trip was not going
to be a theme-park ride of sterile plea-
sures.
From Texas, the road took me any-
where and everywhere, travelling in
a north-west direction to Alaska. The
bike was the biggest I’d ever ridden.
Previous to which my riding experi-
ence was limited to a few laps around
the odd paddock on small dirt bikes
or a Honda CB250 at Honda Australia
Rider Training facility in Melbourne,
Australia where I obtained my motor-
bike license two days prior of depart-
ing for the trip.
I travelled 25,000+ kilometres by
road through 14 States, 2 Provinces, 1
Territory and passed through 4 border
crossings over 7 months of touring.
I have a rather large soft spot for
film after coming full-circle, shoot-
ing exclusively digital for over 2.5yrs
from 2005. My intention was to docu-
ment this trip using a medium format
Pentax 6×7 and Pentax K1000 camer-
as. I shot mostly Velvia 100 slide and
Agfa Neopan 400 or 800 120film, and
Kodak Portra 160VC 35mm neg. Two
late additions to the camera bag, a
pair of Canon AE-1 Program cameras
both with 50mm 1.4f lenses which I
picked up while in Las Vegas. I made
TRAVERSE 39
a mounting bracket to attach the cam-
eras to the bike in order to capture 3D
stereoscopic images while I rode the
road ahead. I was unable to fully test
this method with both cameras simul-
taneously, but instead captured 2D im-
ages while riding and later mounted
high powered driving lights onto it to
facilitate riding at night.
Another aspect of the trip was to
document my experiences in written
form and publish. For this purpose, I
took a Brother EP-20 electric typewrit-
er (circa 1982) and employed the pow-
er of a “Fax-to-Email” service which
allowed me to fax pages from any-
where in the US to a special fax num-
ber, which then converted the fax to
a .JPG and sent to me via email, then
autonomously uploaded to my site. A
small Eee PC was also later brought
along to allow online editing and in-
sertion of images.
This is part of the journey, this is
heading north …
With a light drizzle starting to
quantify, the Wyoming roads before
us glossed over with a shimmery wet
shine. The ping of rain drops against
the helmets outer shell made a rhyth-
mic chorus of percussion. Sights were
set on reaching the interior of Yellow-
stone National Park on the border
with Montana by sundown. Making
what was thought to be good time, Ma-
vis was given a rest from the thrash-
ing of days prior. Across the plains we
travelled, gradually once more return-
ing to altitude within the Teton Range
of the Rocky Mountains. Hitting Jack-
son, Wyoming (also known by, Jack-
son Hole) we rode into town, a swarm
of traffic engulfed us as we searched
the bustling street for a petrol station.
The town was most definitely worth
the time to stop, look and explore, but
with the ever present lack-of-funds,
setting up “base camp” within my
bank account and a falling sun, a de-
cision was struck to grab a quick bite
to eat and depart for a campsite within
Yellowstone.