Preface

"So that was how it happened."-- C.K. Shepherd

In 1918, shortly after the end of World War I, an officer of the Royal Air Force decided that he had nothing better to do than go and see America. He accomplished this the following year by riding his motorcycle on a meandering three month trip beginning in New York City and ending in San Francisco, and he wrote a book about it, called simply "Across America By Motorcycle."

His name was Cyril K. Shepherd, and here is how he described the trip later:

The whole trip, which covered just fifty miles short of 5,000, was undertaken quite alone, and although spread over about three months, constituted a day or two short of a month of actual riding....

The total number of replacements to the engine alone comprised the following: Five new cylinders; three pistons; five gudgeon pins; three complete sets of bearings; two connecting rods, and eleven sparking plugs.

The machine was entirely overhauled on four occasions between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and on three of these by recognized agents of the manufacturers. The engine cut-out switch was the only part of the machine that did not break, come loose, or go wrong sooner or later. I was thrown off 142 times, and after that I stopped counting! Apart from that I had no trouble.

I came across Shepherd's book at the Internet Archive a few years ago, where it had fallen into the public domain and been uploaded by a library in Berkeley, California. There aren't many books of motorcycle travel I would consider "great," but Across America is one of my favorites, partly for the historical window it opens to a different age of travel, but mostly for Shepherd's narration.

Some ideas hit you out of the blue and suddenly the path ahead is clear, and it doesn't seem to make a difference whether the ideas are particularly good ones. I'm a freelance writer, living in Baltimore, and I've been planning a cross-country motorcycle trip for some time. By "planning" I mean that I knew I would start in Baltimore, go to the other side of the country, and then come back. So there were several thousands of miles in between that I had not yet accounted for.

Then the other day I realized what I needed to do. I had to follow in the tire tracks of an (admittedly rather obscure) English motorcyclist and author, and take the route that he had taken some 90 years before, to see how things had changed.

I'm not planning on exactly re-enacting his trip. I don't have three months free, most of the roads he used are long gone (more on that later) and I don't think I can pull off a mustache. I'll do my best, though, to see some of the things he saw, and run a course as close to his as time and circumstance allow. This will be the record of that trip, updated as often as I can.

So that's how it happened.