Hey Ted, where ya bin'?

1999 was an exciting year for me. I spent most of it riding my Tiger around the states looking for things to write about.

The journey began on Memorial Day with the 49ers rally in California's Gold Country, and then I made my way across the Sierras, to Nevada and Utah, and eventually over the Rockies to Colorado. I visited old friends in Boulder and then crossed the mid-West to go to the Triumph Come Home Rally in Pennsylvania. Later on I made it to Jay Strait's Triumph Days in Sturbridge, Mass. and met up with Triumph's brilliant new show truck

I did the national BMW-MOA rally at Rhinebeck, in New York State, and the Glory Days race meet in Weedsport, NY. That was fabulous. I'd never watched dirt track racing before, and found it thrilling. From there I crossed over to Wisconsin, via Michigan and the ferry to Manitowoc, to spend some time with the Kawasaki Concours people at Devils Head, before taking a few weeks off in Europe.

Since then I've travelled from Chicago to Richmond, VA and Williamsburg, where I made an appearance at a BMW rally, and said a sad goodbye to my power book which was inexplicably shattered inside my tank bag. I managed to save my hard drive in Princeton, NJ, where I was visiting an old friend from London, and transferred the contents to a new G3 which I love but could hardly afford.

So then on to Connecticut and, later, two fabulous days on Martha's Vineyard in the company of Robert Fulton and his wife Anne. Robert is 90 years old, but sharp and bright as a new pin. Maybe you've read his inspiring book, "One Man Caravan". In 1932 he set off on a whim, much as I did 40 years later, to travel the world on a bike. I identified closely with his perceptions and experiences although they came out of a quite different era, and it simply confirms the power of our kind of traveling to elicit timeless and universal human responses in the most varied circumstances.

A few days later I was in Illinois and Iowa, riding combines with farmers, and getting as close as I could to the heart of American agriculture. And since then I've been drifting slowly south, through Kansas and Oklahoma, New Orleans, and Alabama, Thanksgiving in Georgia with Pete Tamblyn, and on to Florida, the Keys, and my rendevous with Ernest H. Then back through aligator and Dell Webbe country, the bayous, Austin, Arizona, San Diego and home after 20,000 miles on the road.

Index

Home Page
. . . about small worlds
. . . about the bike
. . . about meetings in the desert
. . . about snakebite insurance
. . . about growing into the saddle
. . . about five o'clock follies
You can read Reviews
Perhaps you would you like to know more
about my new books, Riding High and The Gypsy in Me
Click here to find out how to order

Or you could read my ongoing account of a journey around Europe last year.

After I got back from Europe last year I flew to Kansas, where South Western College had asked me to speak to about 250 students and faculty about "making a difference" in life (At least, that was how I interpreted it). I spent a lot of time preparing for that privilege, and I've put the speech on another page because I think the ideas are important - although you are very welcome to disagree. In fact, I invite you to. So if you want to read more of my delectable prose, try clicking on speech. Please email me your comments.

For those who are interested, I've left my road reports from 1997 at the bottom of this page.

For all general questions or suggestions, please email me at tsimon@mcn.org or call (800) 593 2603 and leave me a message. Thank you very much for your interest.

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And so, back to 1997

Last year's eight-month Odyssey, the mother of all author tours, is over, and of all the things I learned the one that first came to mind was this: It's healthier and better on a bike. Thirty thousand miles through 38 states in the driving seat of a Toyota have done as much damage to my body as 3oo days behind a computer. I loved everything else my Toyota did for me, but not that. Now I know why the supermarket drug aisles are packed with Tums, Maalox and PeptoAbysmal. I'm reduced to a jiggling sack of unrelated organs. Well, not quite that bad, but bad enough.

On the other hand, I'd have to say it was an exhilarating success. I think Jupiter's Travels is back in the public domain. I sold more than three thousand copies, and signed well over a thousand of them, which means I have personally met at least that many readers who, I feel confident, will appreciate my efforts. I also met a great many more who had already read Jupiter's Travels and simply wanted to shake my hand. To my huge gratification many of them picked up The Gypsy in Me, on the principle, I suppose, that "if he can write one good book maybe he can write another." And among all these people I have made many firm friends who I hope will want to keep in touch with me for a long time.

There's a lot more to say about all this, and I'll get round to it some time soon. Stuff was been piling up at home, naturally, and it took months to sort out the chaos. Some things will never be the same. My chickens are history, picked off one by one, in cruel deliberation, by some predator at first identified as a hawk, then a bob cat, then a raccoon and finally as a weasel, that being the only creature capable of squeezing through a half-inch chink in the coop. The hay got rained on. The roof sprang a leak. The fruit is falling off the trees. What do you expect if you leave a place that long? I'm busy, but happy, and expect to meet more people and do more shows soon, mainly in California, my home state, which I've neglected so far.

So, going back to May . . . . . .

This leg of my wanderings began on Wednesday, May 21st, after desperate last minute attempts to make sure somebody was going to bring in the hay, lease the pasture, feed the cat and the chickens, and open the mail for another three months. Drove two thousand miles across amazing expanses of painted desert and high plains like oceans where the ghosts of buffalo roam, wishing every mile of the way that I was on a bike. The weather was wild. You have to have weather to get perspective, as I learned all over again. Slept fancy in Kingman, grubby in Lubbock, and arrived through cloudbursts in Rockdale, where Marty Johnston and his crew grinned bravely as it rained on their parade. Obviously the weather kept a number of fair weather bikers away, but nevertheless, the 27th annual Texas Hill Country Tour gathered steam and we had a lot of fun.

Then came a slightly more leisurely four days from Texas to Maryland. Spent a night deep in the woods off Lynchburg at the beautifully hand-made home of Charlie Robinson. Then on to Thurmont and the BMW square route rally, where I stayed with Bob Higdon, jewel among writers and one of the funniest guys on or off wheels.

From whence to Lake George and Americade.

Americade is said to be the world's biggest motorcyle touring rally. Estimates of numbers vary between thirty and fifty thousand. A fairly small lakeside town has devoted itself to serving them and getting fat off them once a year. The rumbling of engines is permanent, and reminds me of a practice day at Monza.

I have a booth in the Tourexpo tent. The Earls are warbling "Marie" into my right ear. Bill, my neighbour, has stacks of CD albums set out in front of him - three and four CDs to a box - all the golden oldies from Little Anthony to Frankie Valli AND MORE. He plays them relentlessly on his boom box, and already after three days I'm saturated with the treacly sounds of the fifties. A woman comes up to Bill and asks, acerbically:
"What's this got to do with motorcycles?"
It's a question that's been nagging at me, persistently. The riders amble past me, all 40,000 of them, 30 a minute, 1800 an hour, in their emblazoned leather vests, head bands, and little leather hats. I have painted a big map on a sheet, eight feet by four feet, showing my route around the world. It's nice, colorful. You'd think it would attract attention. Also I have a nice poster of me as a younger, more handsome fellow (albeit looking too much like Ringo) with my bike and laid out around it, all the bits and parts that I took with me. WHAT TOOK TED SIMON AROUND THE WORLD?, it asks. You'd think that would catch the eye. Well, you'd be 0.01% right. Which translates into forty books sold. The other 99.99% come in two kinds. There's the guys together, usually the Knights of Somewhere, flashing their tattooed biceps at me, looking stern and menacing.
"If you value your life", I seem to hear them muttering, "you better not try to sell me a BOOK!"

Then there's the guys and gals together. Or, all too often, the double-guys and double-gals, those of the thunderous tread, escapees from the Lost World - I picture them being hoisted onto their Goldwings like medieval knights in armor. Their eyes, on the whole, are averted, fixed on an inner vision of patches and pin-stripes; their reason for being there is to let me read, on the backs of their jackets, their rank and function in whatever biking heirarchy they belong to. I get the impression ( wrong, I hope) that they may not even know what a book is.

Everybody here is identified with a product. Why I don't know. People used to gather together to share an activity. That came first. Now it's the make of bike. Got a Harley? Gotta ride with Harleys. Got a Goldwing. Gotta go with the Wingers. Some are doing awfully well out of all this. One of them, for example, is the man who started the Gold Wing Road Riders Association. He has become so self-important that he closes his office annually for Founder's Day. But what has all this got to do with motorcycles, as I understand them?
Am I complaining? No. Forty books is fine by me. And I really liked that 0.01%.

A funny thing happened to me on my way to the motel. The street was covered with police, lights twinkling all across the road like Miami Vice, stopping everyone. A perky cop came up to my Toyota and looked at my California plate. Then he asked, harshly I thought, "Are you from Nevada?"
"No", I said, puzzled.
"What are you doing here?" he said abruptly. I couldn't make any sense of this at all.
"I'm here to speak at the rally."
"What rally?" This was becoming absurd. I bit my tongue.
"Americade," I said tersely. He peered down at me even more sharply.
"Are you Ted Simon?" he asked.
I was dumbfounded.
"Yes", I said, "but how on earth . . . "
"Oh, we know all about you. You're famous. You can go."
I drove on in a ferment of rising astonishment. Had I broken through at last? Even the cops had heard of me. Were fame and fortune finally at my door? I arrived at the motel and entered my room. There was a mirror on the wall and I looked into it. There, pinned to my chest, I saw a large card announcing: "TED SIMON"

On Father's Day, thanks to a good friend, I enjoyed a break in Washington DC, and visited the Newseum, close to Key Bridge. This beautifully staged exhibit of the history and meaning of news would excite anybody, but it pulls on my heartstrings particularly, because I was once a worker in the mills that grind out this universally demanded product. As any ex-newspaperman will tell you, the ink leaves an indelible stain. It was years before I stopped jumping when the phone rang. Wherever I was, I always thought it was for me.
There is some sadness too, strolling through the aisles of the museum, to see how quaint my personal experiences now seem and how obsolete are some of the skills that I fought so hard to master. Once I had to shout to he heard over the clatter of a dozen linotype machines. Now they stand there like fossils. Once I was proud of my ability to read a page upside down and back to front as I stood opposite the compositor who assembled the hot type on a "stone"; and I'm amazed at the sure-handedness with which I slammed discarded copy down on the spike without ever impaling myself in the process. Now these things are done with a touch of the keys. It's hard for me to take carpal tunnel syndrome seriously.

The indelibility of ink reminds me of a story from the thirties that doesn't seem old-fashioned at all. Newspapers, I was told, employed "sib spreaders" to increase their circulations. Here's an example of what they did. A man comes into a pub in Glasgow reading a rival paper, the Daily Express. He makes friends, buys rounds, and returns frequently, always reading the Daily Express. One day he comes in with his arms in bandages, complaining about a mysterious rash that has made his life a misery. Then, a few days later, he comes in reading the Daily Mail (his employer) and his skin has miraculously healed.
"Would you believe it," he tells his drinking buddies. "It turned out to be the ink off the Express, but thank heavens the Mail doesn't use that poisonous stuff." People were actually paid to do this. I've always wondered how many pubs they could get around in an evening.

At the Newseum there's a 100-foot-long Wall of News, wall-to-wall TV screens, where dozens of commentators compete with news from around the world. It makes me think hard about what I'm doing. The challenge for me is to explain why it is important to go to strange foreign places, why I want "Jupiter's Travels" to inspire more people to pick up sticks and wander off across the world's deserts and mountains. Why bother when there's TV to bring the deserts and mountains to you?

Now I remember. News tells you nothing about what it's like to be out there. News retails certain facts, and that's important, even vital, but it also completely distorts the context. There's no escaping it. The danger, and I think it's an extreme danger, is that we, the consumers, don't know that. We might think we have a grasp of what it's like to live in Bosnia, or Somalia, or Iraq, or Congo. We risk being even more misguided than the Algerian who thinks everyone in the United States lives in permanent fear of floods, earthquakes, tornados and drive-by shootings.

From my own experience I know the value of living in a culture where there are fewer material choices. But how can this be conveyed? And who would listen? And as the information age billows out, bloated mainly with our western interpretation of events, colored by our view of things, we simply obliterate so many alternative patterns of living that have been evolved over the centuries. It's why I love those damned awkward French. At least they try to hold on to something different. What is the good of it all, if you can't stop for a decent lunch? Vivent les differences! Aux barricades!

So PLEASE, I beg of you, go somewhere - India, Africa, South America - before it's too late. Give yourself a break and take enough time to know what it feels like out there. Help save our human past for our future.

I've been to the Honda Hoot in Asheville, where my percentages multiplied by a factor of ten. And then to the BMW rally in Fredericksburg where, despite dismal prophecies and torrents of rain, almost 4000 people came to a really wonderful park to enjoy what in my limited experience was one of the nicest rallies I've seen. And of course my personal percentages shot up again, which is no more than I expect from BMW riders.

But finally, at Sturbridge, Massachussetts, I found myself looking out over a sea of vintage Triumphs, and the sense of belonging was more than I can bear. I have had a hard time, in America, defending my choice of a Triumph to travel around the world, and it was great to be among people who rode that same bike, and many older ones, hundreds of miles to Jaye Strait's Triumph Day rally. They know what those bikes can do, and I no longer feel so isolated.

Since then I've been hosted first by one of America's oldest clubs, the Queensborough, in the shade of Shea Stadium - a really a great experience, and I sport their honorary golden tee shirt in remembrance - and then by one of America's fanciest clubs, the Madison Avenue Sports Car and Chowder Society, which meets monthly at Sardi's Restaurant. That's the place with the cartoons of all the showbiz greats around the walls. It fed straight into my boyhood dreams of a very different America - the black and white America of old movies, where people lived half their lives in these fabulous clubs and restaurants. It was great to live it for a while, and I thank the folks - John Shuck in particular - who made it possible.

The Mid-Ohio Vintage Days were wonderful. Great people, lot's of enthusiasm, and it was fun sitting with Melissa Pierson and watching her books streaming out into the crowd along with mine.

So now I've got to tell you about Chicago. It was about as hot and sticky as it gets when I arrived at Bob's BMW world on Western Avenue. He has a warehouse that he's filled with bikes - a great semi-subterranean warren of ancient brick. With the sweat pouring off everyone, and guys of all descriptions working into the night, I thought I was back in Bombay.
The BMW guys gave me a great welcome at their club. And next night I was at Larry's Ace Cafe on West Roscoe. What a fine place. What terrific food and beer. What a pity so few people turned up. Was it the rain? Were they afraid of melting? Come on, guys, where's your britiron?

And, I took my first ride in a sidecar, out to Highland Park, with Bob Honemann driving. There aren't many people I would trust my life to like that. He is a neat and skilful person, and only tipped me up once for the hell of it.

My first ever night with the Hogs, in Merrillville, was another night to remember, because we went on to a biker bar called In The Wind, where all sorts of exciting and unmentionable things happened (oh, you know, the usual unmentionable things) - in dramatic contrast to yesterday evening's event at the upscale library in Carmel, outside Indianapolis, where nothing unmentionable happened at all. That didn't spoil the enjoyment though. John Flora, and Christine at the library, put a huge amount of effort into spreading the word. A lot of people came, and I'd say it was a real success.