I turned 70 in April of 2018. This adventure is a birthday present to myself.
Having spent the last half-century roaming the globe, living and/or traveling in 80+ countries, I now intend to explore my home state of Texas.
Texas has 254 counties, and I will visit all of them on one of my motorcycles. I’ll take photos of the bike and myself in front of each county courthouse, though the courthouses are just waypoints – the purpose of the journey is to enjoy the sights, sounds, smells, and vistas of Texas from the vantage point of a steel horse.
I’ve long felt a kinship with the lone wolves of the American West, or the ronin of medieval Japan, and there’s no better contemporary way of recreating that experience than going solo from town to town on a motorcycle. (Who was that masked man?) Of course it is equally easy to parody the whole thing as a kind of one-man “Wild Hogs” episode, but either one is better than sitting in front of the TV or the Internet all day.
The original plan called for ten 1-5 day trips, shown on the color-coded map below, plus some day trips from Wimberley, shown in white.
The actual visits, as of the end of the trip on 2 November 2018, are shown on this map:
Mount up!