Good Vibrations: Coast to Coast by Harley (Summersdale travel) [Paperback]

''A pithy throbber of a book' --Chris Stewart (Author of Driving Over Lemons)

''Good tomes for bikers are few and far between, but Tom Cunliffe's account of an epic trip deserves to battle for bookshelf space with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.'' --Sunday Express

''There is only one way to see America and its people; chasing, finding and losing the real fantasy that is her dream, and that is astride a motorcycle ... Listening to Cunliffe ...you'll understand why.'' --The Metro

'Good tomes for bikers are few and far between, but Tom Cunliffe's account of an epic trip deserves to battle for bookshelf space with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.'

'.one of the most fresh, raw and honest travel books I have ever read.throbs with all the verve and excitement of the open road.'

'Pure Magic'

'If you long for wide open spaces.read this book. A good travelling tale.'

'The two Brits' pithy commentary is required reading for anyone who has ever thought of riding a bike off the American beaten track.A fun book about their journey of a lifetime.'

'A motorcycle the size of Roz's Betty Boop would have been beyond the dreams of the craziest pack leader at the Ace Cafe on London's North Circular Road in the monochrome days of rockers, Nortons, Bonnevilles and Marianne Faithfull, when 'good' was middle class, 'bad' misunderstood and the motorcycle offered stark hope to a generation of inarticulate searchers ...' Tom Cunliffe and his wife Roz take life in the saddle and on to the American highways and byways astride the quintessential 'dream machine' - the Harley-Davidson. Bikes Betty Boop and Black Madonna are chrome steeds for an extensive road-trip: from Maryland on the east coast to San Francisco on the west (and then back again), they thunder their way over the sun-beaten plains, through scorching Death Valley, neon Las Vegas, the deep South and everywhere in between. With flashbacks to the Sixties, the eclectic assortment of moonshiners, bikers hard and not-so-hard, cowhands, Sioux Indians, strippers, bible-bashers, war veterans, southern gents and the occasional alligator delivers a unique insight into the diversity of the USA. An easy-riding peepshow into today's America through British eyes and between the handlebars of the great Harley-Davidson.

Tom was born in 1947. He was educated at a grammar school in the North of England before going on to read law at the University of Liverpool. In 1968 he left the world of academia behind him and has pursued a career in sailing ever since. Starting as an uncertified instructor in the South of France, he has served before the mast in small sailing ships, skippered yachts for private owners, raced offshore, been to sea as mate on a British-registered coasting vessel and taught sailing, seamanship and navigation at all levels. He is one of country's senior Yachtmaster Examiners and is a consultant for the governing body of sailing in the United States. In his own yachts he has cruised with his family and friends to destinations as diverse as Brazil, Iceland, the Caribbean and Russia. Tom has been a writer since 1986, he is a columnist for Yachting Monthly has authored 15 books, including two 'Best Book of the Sea' award winners for Topsail and Battleaxe and Hand, Reef and Steer. Tom has been riding motorcycles since 1965. The bikes have included a 250cc BSA C15 that taught him about mechanical breakdowns, a 650cc Matchless that almost killed him at the age of 19, various reliable Hondas and Yamahas in the 70s and 80s, a Kawasaki GPZ1100 whose performance you simply couldn't ignore, a 1979 Triumph Bonneville T140 and the star of Good Vibrations a Harley Davidson Soft-tail called Black Madonna. Tom is married to Ros, fellow biker and sailor. Together they have a daughter called Hannah. Check out his own website at www tomcunliffe.com.

CHAPTER ONE

The expedition into the America lying behind the coastlands began with the hunt for a bike suitable for Roz. It took less than a day to exhaust the slim pickings off the Washington Beltway and move on to the hot-house streets of Baltimore. We were both jet-lagged after a classic departure from Britain - four hours' sleep, a delayed flight and aggravation in the luggage queue - so morale was easily eroded. Buying a motorcycle might not sound a major challenge for a woman in good shape who has battled gales off Greenland and fronted up to drunken dockers in Leningrad, but we'd found nothing in two sweltering days and I could tell that the latest used-bike joint shook her confidence.

From the outside, it was a squat, oblong box set ten yards from a shouting street corner where brakes squealed and vehicles poured out their heat at the traffic lights. Inside, the racket was hardly muted by the thin walls and there was no air-conditioning to ease our pain, but at least we were sheltered from the sun. Tossing the local newspaper advertisements page onto a pile of rubbish behind the door, I glanced around. Dead machines of indeterminate ancestry lay against the walls; rat-bikes still carried the dust of the plains in the spent oil beneath their crank cases; in a greasy corner a man with a nasty scar was ripping the skin off his knuckles trying to coax life into a Japanese no-hoper, while up front stood a 'full-dress' Harley-Davidson sporting the most tasteless, mock zebra seat cover ever devised. The motorcycles were demoralising, but it was the character slinking out of a door labelled 'Sales' that seemed to be creeping under Roz's skin.

She wore white stiletto slingbacks, a heavy chain on her right ankle and a long red dress slit to the knickers with a couple of buttons for modesty, which weren't done up. The higher reaches of the creation were equally revealing and a colourful tattoo of a murder weapon leered out from its left side just north of the cleavage.

'How can I help you?' Voice low and breathy. She ignored Roz and planted herself in front of me, looking directly up through the mascara. At six and a half feet tall, I enjoy a splendid view of women in low-cut dresses who stand too close. I benefited from this now, but tore my gaze from the dripping dagger.

'My wife,' I said, 'wants a used Harley-Davidson that'll make it to the West Coast and back.'

She tossed her frizzed blonde mane and countered by asking if I was Australian. Lucky for her she wasn't accusing an Aussie of being a Brit, I thought. He might take offence. Not me though. I began to tell her that I was from Lancashire, but she had already clambered away through the heaps to an elderly blue Harley with an 8,000 dollar price tag. For an awful moment I feared she might throw a leg over it, but she invited Roz to give it a go instead. The seat had been fashionably lowered in some former life, so at least the bike was the right height from the ground. The first we'd seen. Gingerly, Roz wormed her way into the sagging saddle to reassure herself that with the 'chopped' custom styling her feet easily reached the grimy floor. This was at least a beginning, because if a girl can't reach God's firm earth and has to support 600 pounds of iron from a standing start, she's backing a loser. Despite evidence on the tank and handlebars of a slide down some highway, this bike was the first to be chalked up for the trial squad, but it only took a couple of seconds to conclude that it wasn't going to make the final selection.

'Never mind the state of it,' Roz hissed in my ear, 'check out the starter button.'

There wasn't one. The bike was so ancient it had a kick-start.

A week earlier, on her forty-fifth birthday, Roz had passed her motorcycle test rather than risk sitting behind me for the entire trip. Paddling her own canoe has always been her style, but the sixth-hand, lightweight Suzuki that had satisfied the Minister of Transport's legal representative on the breezy heathlands of southern England, cut no ice with the massive reality of the all-American road-burner. The only similarities between 'Suzie' and this two-wheeled monster were a lack of electric starting and a readiness for the bone yard. Booting a tiny, worn down two-stroke into life might just be acceptable, Roz's look implied, but jumping up and down on an ill-tuned lump of rust more than ten times its mass was not on her list of 'things I must do'.

I didn't blame her. I remembered walking with a limp for weeks after spraining an ankle starting my Matchless, easy meat compared with this wild animal. That had been thirty years earlier back in Liverpool when I was a law student and founder member of the 'Ton-in-the-Tunnel Club'.

In those days, the two-mile Mersey Tunnel suffered from a provocative 30mph limit. The trick was to hit the entrance at 3a.m., dawdle casually past the security men, wind the bike up to 100 along the straight section under the river with your exhausts howling back from the walls and the lights flashing by like a lunatic fairground, then trundle out the other end after stopping for a minute or so before the last corner in case the cops were timing you through. I fancy I'm smarter now and didn't relish kicking the Harley either, so making lame excuses about blue being the wrong colour, we made for the door.