From MSNBC.COM:
ALL FIVE recently published titles in the Discovery Travel Adventures series offer 18 tours for paddle sport enthusiasts, scuba divers, bird watchers and those who plan to venture into the back country or explore caves or canyons.
Another recent title, Great American Motorcycle Tours by Gary McKechnie, takes this idea on the road with 20 different tours or runs for motorcycle enthusiasts. These tours focus on the freedom of riding the open road but are designed to include cultural experiences along the way....
Great American Motorcycle Tours: by Gary McKechnie with foreword by Peter Fonda (John Muir/Avalon Travel Publications; $17.95, paperback)
In this unique and friendly guide, longtime rider Gary McKechnie details 20 different motorcycle tours from the Pacific Coast Run to the Hudson River Valley Run, from the Southern Comfort Run to the Mighty Montana Run, and with 16 other regional runs in between.
McKechnie's Way favors back roads - he reveres solitude and brakes for breathtaking scenery - but he doesn't want you to miss any cool sights or good road food along the way. So on the Tropical Paradise Run - before heading out for a 150-mile, seven-day ride from Miami down the Florida Keys to Key West - McKechnie proposes: Why not "pull it over" and check out the Art Deco District of Miami's South Beach? Or if you plan on making the Berkshires-Central Vermont Run, and if Tanglewood is in season, pull it over and catch the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
That's the fun of Great American Motorcycle Tours and its urban cowboy style with one eye on the open road and the other on the lookout for history and culture. Sometimes McKechnie lapses into a Zen moment, too, waxing paradoxical about his escape from a corporate cubicle ("I developed a more natural use of time and learned that everything worked out all right even when things went wrong"). Still, he doesn't take the on-the-road thing too seriously, and a light touch prevails.
Besides serious information on packin g, equipment, road conditions and resources like motorcycle shops on every run, sidebars add local flavor (like a recollection of Elvis by a Memphis bike-shop owner whose store is on The Blues Cruise Memphis to New Orleans Run). Don't look for great photos although small black and whites give a hint of what's ahead. The sidebars are a better use of space, with brief bios of famous motorcycles and safe-riding tips for specific runs, like what to do when bears or bison try to hog the road in Yellowstone on the Wild West Run.
McKechnie's book is mainly in guy-speak, perhaps sensibly directed to the male majority of motorcycle owners. Nonetheless, he tosses in an occasional send-up of the macho image (as when he writes, in a sidebar on loosening up: "Even though I'm a mighty, mighty man, after a few hundred miles in the saddle my muscles can get tight and screw up the next day's ride").
As McKechnie notes, since 1991 the sale of new motorcycles has climbed every year. With 31 million bikers in the nation, ranging from Hell's Angels to moguls like Malcolm Forbes, the time is ripe for this first-ever national motorcycle touring guide, and McKechnie has certainly gone the distance.