LIFE HAPPENS…
When things went bad for Pete Myers he hit the road, without a plan…
When life happened to Pete Myers he learned to ride a bike, quit his job, sold his house, put what little he wanted to keep in storage and set off. Without a plan. 62,000+ miles later he’s ready to tell the tale…
IT WAS SUMMER 2016 and I was driving home when I saw a sign. The sign said ‘Bristol Motorcycle Training Centre’. I’d been past it twice a day almost every day for ten years and never given it a second thought… For reasons I can’t explain, that day, I turned off my usual route and walked into reception. Before I knew it I’d signed up for motorcycle training. I passed the final part of the test, first attempt, on 6 December, 2016. It was fortunate that I passed my test first time, because my other new winter hobby of visiting motorcycle dealerships had also paid off handsomely; a brand new Triumph Tiger 800XCA was being delivered to my home that same afternoon. That evening, sat at the kitchen table, it was crystal clear what I needed to do. I needed to ride this bike as far as I could. I had to use this new found two-wheeled freedom to take me to places and put me in situations I could never have imagined I’d find myself in. The only questions were where should I go and when should I set off?
The latter question was easy – as soon as possible. The old adage ‘don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today’ had been brought into sharp focus the previous year when my wife died soon after being diagnosed with a particularly aggressive brain cancer. I knew this adventure wasn’t something I could leave until a more sensible time. I needed to do this now, even though I knew it would be detrimental to my career as a director of an aerospace engineering business. The second question was less easy to answer. I wasn’t exactly known for being a spontaneous risk taker and yet here I was plotting a long distance, solo ride on a motorbike I barely knew how to ride. Before setting off I’d had yoghurts in my fridge older than my bike licence. All things considered this was very definitely a dumb idea, so I decided the best plan was to have no plan. Just start riding and see what happened. If I liked it I would carry on. If I didn’t I would ride home and try to resurrect a once promising career.
It took me a few months to dispose of the house, car and a few other things that had previously been important to me. Everything I couldn’t or didn’t want to sell went into a selfstorage shipping container, where it remains to this day. This is how I found myself on 4 September, 2017 booking a berth on that night’s Harwich to Hook of Holland ferry. I chose that route for no reason other than I had some good friends who lived near Amsterdam and that sounded like a cool place to start a big bike ride.
I arrived in southern Germany keen to change into clean, warm, dry clothes. I opened the pannier and found to my horror it was comprehensively empty. In the excitement of my symbolic grand departure from Amsterdam I had left all my
clothes behind. It was at that moment I knew I wanted to carry on riding for as long as my enthusiasm for sleeping in tents and dealing with my own stupidity allowed. So, I rode around Europe and Morocco until Christmas while simultaneously hatching a plan to continue in the New Year. A quick inspection of Google Maps revealed the distance between northern Alaska and southern Argentina was probably the longest unbroken land mass on the planet (I found out later the road isn’t exactly unbroken, but more about that later). I figured that would be a good place for a long bike ride and started making arrangements to start as soon as the harsh Alaskan winter had passed.
Leaving the bike behind in London ready for its flight to Anchorage, I hankered after sunshine after ice had started forming on my forearms during the latter days of my deep winter European tour.
The Southern Hemisphere summer was clearly the answer so I boarded a flight to Auckland on New Year’s Eve. After a month riding around New Zealand on a rented BMW F800GS Trophy, I flew to Perth, Australia. From the airport I went directly to a local motorcycle dealer where I picked up a secondhand BMW R1200GS Adventure that I had bought online, and unseen, a week earlier.
That night I was camping by the beach just south of Fremantle studying a map, working out how far it was to ride along the coast to northern Queensland taking in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane on the way. I figured riding solo across Australia, taking in the interminable emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain, would be good practice for what was to come in the Americas.
Brisbane became my exit point from Australasia and I started furiously riding across this vast island. I was constantly amazed by its landscapes and incredible, unique wildlife. I sold the bike to a Brisbane policeman and boarded a flight a couple of days later to Dubai and before I knew it I was heading to Alaska with the bike. The main event was about to start and I was excited. What lay ahead was an unknown length of time and distance riding across incredibly varied terrain in just about every climate system on Earth.
I knew that Canadian Rockies, the deserts and mountains of the western United States, the heat and humidity of Central America, the dense jungles and formidable Andes mountain range of South America, the southern Patagonian ice fields of Chile and Argentina and the remoteness and Antarctic climate of Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego would all test the Triumph, my gear and I. Yet I couldn’t wait to get started. Towards the end of April 2018, with snow and ice still in abundance, I rode out of Anchorage airport and headed north towards Fairbanks via Denali National Park…
‘This was definitely a dumb idea, so I decided the best plan was to have no plan’