Hi, I’m Les Kay and my travelling partner is Cai, my 18yr old son. We live in a small village in North Wales,
I’ve ridden bikes for thirty years. Mostly for the enjoyment but also as in instructor, this eventually detracted from my enjoyment. Cai’s early experiences never progressed beyond sitting on bikes under someone else’s control. That all changed a few months before his 17th birthday when he got an early Christmas/birthday present, a cheap and nasty Chinese copy of the XL125. But hey, it did the trick! We’d take it round the fields at a friend’s, playing at locking the rear wheel under control, falling off and slow delicate stuff. By his 18th birthday he’d passed his test and gone onto an old CB250 RSA, then a Cagiva 500 Canyon. The progression was timed to bring his riding standard and confidence up to scratch for starting this trip.
There is so much behind organising a long distance journey on a bike. It’s generally believed the better organised, the less that can go wrong; yet often it’s the things going wrong that make a journey more memorable. I find the unexpected generally provides more variety in life than the expected; it’s less tainted with your own preconceptions. By far the better way to ride is to keep your eyes and mind open; its not that you look for the obscure or profound experiences, just be aware of them when they occur. And boy do they occur!
The intention is to start in LA and head north along the coast road, Highway 1. Somewhere between
We’ve planned this for the last eighteen months. With only one week to go now it still doesn’t seem very real. There’s too much to get our heads round and too many people who want to know everything we plan to do. How do we know what we’re going to do? We won’t get bikes till we reach LA; which ones, we don’t know. We have our luggage and all the equipment we’re taking packed! Now all there is left to do is pack the rest of my household goods away and throw a massive party to say cheerio to all our friends. Aren’t all trips started with a healthy hangover? I hope not!
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