Author Archive | Gareth Morgan

Mary Baird , Calvary Residential Home, Centre Street, Invercargill, New Zealand. Make her day special My Mum Mary is turning 94 and as I won’t be there on May 17th please send her a card. How would you like it if your daughter went away on her motor-bike and didn’t come to the party? I’ll […]

Yesterday our first day off the bikes since we started. We were to meet in the lobby at 7am, so some day off (you might say). A day off means you get to wear fresh socks around here. So into the public transport system to discover hardly anyone, in the car-filled city, uses it. We […]

One of the boys was meant to write about this day when they put on possom or coon hats and romped around the land that Davy lived on and the house he was born in. The “Davy Crockett” song was sung and we marvelled at how much this boy who was “born on a mountaintop […]

Blue ridge mountain isn’t in West Virginia but I sure felt like “mountain mumma” as we did the Shenandoah Park road. Wonderful riding,,, the trees still totally bare when you get to the tops of the hills at 3000 ft (about 1000m) and various stages of spring as you go down again. We were warned […]

Well, we had a couple of days up our sleeves so a slight detour to Amish country seemed to be a good idea. The mornings are early 30s in degrees F ( around zero in our scale) but warm up to pleasant riding temps. Yesterday I had 9 layers on when we set off. Now […]

Roger, through a friend, has managed to score an invitation to overnight in any Fire Station we’d like as we cross the USA. Sounds ridiculous but when we reached Williamsburg, Virginia we thought we’d taste the hospitality of America’s bravest. We were overwhelmed, Chief TK (Buzz) Weiler and his colleagues Randy Swinton and Eric Stone […]

As we have met more Americans of all types I have to say that I’m blown away by the care and hospitality. They will put an arm around you and wish you well, offer you a room for the night and help in any way. In the “Old Slave Market” in St Augustine I talked […]

Our first run along backroads today – the farming area of North Carolina. It’s Sunday and obvious – the churches, one every 1 kilometres – have been doing great business, their carparks full of RUV’s, pickups and farm vehicles. Strangely the doors of all churches were closed and those that had windows the curtains pulled, […]

  Sited on a tiny island at the heads of Charleston Harbour, South Carolina, Fort Sumter is where the Civil War broke out, just after Abe Lincoln’s election on a platform to abolish slavery yet hold the Union together. The Fort was abandoned by the Yankees on 14 April 1861, and the celebration of its […]

There are cops on the roads everywhere in Miami, mostly riding Harley Heritage Specials. In true US OTT fashion, when the SWAT team goes for its daily jog along the highway, they are accompanied by 30 cops on bikes to shield the exercisers from the traffic. Actually looking at the joggers I’d be bloody worried […]