Rider rides a mile for every issue: 500 in one day…on li’l singles. Because we can.
Ridin? the rollers across the Carrizo Plain on State Route 58. Photos by Kurt Yaeger.
A ride is an experience, a long sequence of moments?some special, most mundane?that unfolds in unexpected ways. That unpredictability, even on a meticulously planned ride, is what makes a motorcycle trip so satisfying. Like you, we’ve gone on countless rides and experienced those moments that make us?motorcyclists?who we are. And in the thousands of pages of Rider published since the summer of 1974, we?ve chronicled thousands of rides across every U.S. state and nearly every country scattered around the globe.
Our 500-mile ride kicked off at 5:00 a.m., well before sunrise. So what better way to commemorate our 500th issue than a ride" Time was tight, so an epic, multi-state tour wasn?t in the cards. But a scenic cruise down Easy Street on two-wheeled BarcaLoungers wouldn?t cut it either. Plenty of blood, sweat and tears went into publishing 500 issues, so the same should go into our ride. (Well, maybe not the blood. Nor the tears. And not too much sweat.)
We considered doing an Iron Butt ride, but riding 1,000 miles in 24 hours is hard and we?re pretty soft. We wanted to have fun on this ride, so we set our sights on a more modest and symbolic goal: riding a mile for every issue in one day. And to make things interesting, we?d do it on single-cylinder tiddlers?a half-Iron Butt Saddles...