American Borders: A Solo Circumnavigation of the United States on a Russian Sidecar Motorcycle,Used

In 1995, Carla King embarked on a solo circumnavigation of America. What made her decision daring was not that she was a woman on a motorcycle. Instead, hers was a doubled adventure, at once rooted in the past and charting the future. She made her trip on a Russian Ural with sidecara motorcycle originally designed in 1938 and revived for sale in 1994while documenting her journey using the then emerging technology of the Internet.King begins by recalling her first motorcycle touring experience, a 1988 ride through Europe on a rented Honda 750 she had intended to take with her husband. Instead, she found herself riding alone, admitting by the time she arrived in Carcassone that her marriage had failed, but having discovered that twowheeled travel can transport a rider in ways that transcend the merely physical.Seven years later she approached the Ural company's American importers with an idea to combine her technical writing and riding experience. The importers agreed to allow King to test their newly modified Russian bike on America's highways. At the same time, she would be traveling the Internet highway, filing regular installments on the Global Network Navigator website for editor Allen Noren (who later published Storm, his account of his own trip around the Baltic Sea). Packing her tools, laptop, camera and scuba gear in her sidecar, she set out from California, heading north along the West coast toward Canada.[A] woman on a motorcycle traveling alone inevitably hears the same question, 'Aren't you scared?' King, though, 'was hardpressed to think of something to be scared aboutapart from the prospect of being alone with my own thoughts for a number of months. Since my first reluctant solo journey, I'd spent a lot of time navigating the world and had managed to avoid trouble.' Even as an experienced rider and an able mechanic, King did, however, find misadventures that had little to do with being a woman.Most came from her 'companion,' the Ural. The bike had been redesigned for sale in America, with electronic ignition and Japanese carburetors, but, as King discovered, the Ural was 'meant for life on a different continent . . . to traverse wartorn Europe and Siberian snowfields.' The aircooled engine overheated in high temperatures and it struggled to attain highway speeds, but the slow pace suited King's desire to soak in the sites and, as she admits, the 'motorcycle's quirks and breakdowns gave me the opportunity to connect with people and places in a special way.'Her encounters with people, more than the landscape, form the substance of King's narrative, from Renata, a young woman on her first motorcyclea BMW 1100 GSheaded for Alaska, to Jeff, a bicyclist riding from Seattle to New York. The staple characters in her story are mechanics. Atone point King even wonders 'if it was my destiny to meet handsome young mechanics with deep blue eyes.'While she was skilled enough to adjust the Ural's finicky carburetors and cables, serious defects plague her, often leaving her stranded on roadsides or in desolate small towns...But she persists, perhaps, as she muses, owing to genetics. In 1927, her grandparents spent their honeymoon traveling America's roadsmost unpavedin a Model T that could reach a top speed of 30 miles per hour, 'downhill with a tailwind.' Eventually, mechanics in Ohio solve the majority of the Ural's problems and King finds that, visiting her family in North Carolina, she has no need to consult her mechanically skilled uncles and cousins.King had intended her journey to 'dispel the notion that traveling solo through the United States was a dangerous and foolhardy undertaking.' Her accessible and engaging account allows a new audience of readers and riders (and riderreaders) to come along for the ridethough, sadly, not in her sidecar. Susanne Ferris, International Journal of Motorcycle Studies