What Happens When You Motorcycle Around the World With Someone You Just Met on a Dating App

BY CAYLA VIDMAR

In Sept. 2017, Heather Lea stepped off her BMW G 650 GS in Magadan, Russia, the final stop in a 93,740km motorcycle ride through 40 countries. Seven years later, her book about the journey will soon be released, detailing the trials and rewards of embarking on the trip with a man she had started dating only 27 days prior.

By all accounts, Lea’s life has been one of well-weighed risk versus reward. She says she’s “more inclined to whimsically agree to stuff and then worry about it later,” a way of living that has taken her solo backpacking in Africa and cycling from Paris to Istanbul.

Her two-year motorcycle trip around the world was born in the same way: a serendipitous match on a dating app and a suggestion to ride down to Patagonia — and then keep going.

Lea sat down with us to chat about the experience, including an excerpt from the book below.

‘Riding Full Circle’: Excerpt

I follow Dave down the dirt track we came up last night, and out onto the logging road, where the morning sun lights up the dust disturbed by his rear tire.

We come to a junction and Dave turns left. After crossing a bridge over the St. Joe’s River, we’re back on the Idaho Backcountry Discovery Route. As soon as we hit the double track made for all-terrain vehicles, Dave’s off like a flash. He’s the only person I know who speeds up when he sees a dirt road, whether he’s in a 4×4 truck or on two wheels.

I ride carefully. Ahead on the trail, I see two boulders as large as woodstoves that I’ll need to squeeze through, but I’m concerned about my hard-case panniers fixed onto luggage racks on both sides of my bike. Am I too wide to fit between them?

Slowing to twenty-five miles an hour, I look where I want to go.

Just when I think I’m past the rocks, an abrupt impact slams into my body, and my motorcycle starts veering out of control. I take in the Ponderosa pines above me, the river to my right, and the ditch on my left. Look where you want to go. Half a second later, I’m stuck under my motorcycle, where it has come to rest in a pine-cone-scattered gully.

My brain elbows through the last few minutes of memory. I was off-center and hit one of the boulders with the hard aluminum pannier on my right side. The collision was so jarring, it sent me into the ditch.

Photo: Riding Full Circle

Sound comes flooding back to my ears once the white noise of alarm has quieted. I hear the river and listen for Dave. No sign of my boyfriend. Even his dust has settled on the track ahead, which follows a curved line of deciduous trees dropping golden leaves to the ground. If the stars were aligned any differently, I’d be face down in the St. Joe’s River right now. Luckily, I’d swerved left instead of right, toward the ditch, not the drop-off.

A gulping cry-laugh bursts from my mouth.

Shit!

When Dave suggested we ride our motorcycles around the world, one of my biggest fears was crashing. Now, less than two weeks into a two-year adventure, I’d done just that.

Finding my point-and-shoot camera in the tank bag strapped between my handlebars, I walk up the trail for a good perspective of the accident scene. In 20-plus years as a freelance writer, I know a good story is nothing without photos. Snapping off a couple shots, I return to zip the camera back into my bag.

It’s then that a searing pain shoots into my wrist at the base of my right thumb. Adrenaline—nature’s morphine—is clearing out and boiling blood rushes up and down my arm. Dizzy and frantic, I sit, cradling my hand.

Please don’t be broken, please don’t be broken.

It’s September 25, 2015 — my 41st birthday.

Author Interview: Heather Lea

Let’s jump right in. Can you tell me about how this trip came to be?

Lea: I had been online dating for about a year and went into my account to actually shut it down because of too many weird experiences. That was when I saw Dave as one of my “matches.” His profile was different from any of the others I had seen, so I decided to send him an email.

Photo: Riding Full Circle

And then 27 days into dating, Dave suggested we ride motorcycles to Patagonia together. I said yes before he even finished the question.

Wow, so a serendipitous start to you two meeting, and then you decided to plan this big trip with someone you met only a month prior. 

Yes, and Dave didn’t even have a motorcycle yet, but he always wanted one. I hadn’t considered getting into long-distance riding until Dave suggested it.

We were in his room looking at a big world map, and he said, “If we’re going to ride to Patagonia, why don’t we just keep going?”

Which turns into a two-year ride around the world …

We planned the trip for over a year. I wanted to wait until we took off-roading courses, and I wanted to learn Russian and Spanish, but if we waited for all that to happen, we never would have gone.

We actually ended up leaving in September 2015, a year earlier than planned.

Tell me about your experience with riding motorcycles. Is this something you’ve done your whole life?

It started when I was 12 years old. My dad had a motorcycle, and it always scared the shit out of me. But he was selling his bike, and said, “This is your last chance to ride,” so I went with him.

I was blown away and thought, “This is amazing. I love this feeling!” But my mom worked in emergency rooms, and because I was a “good daughter,” I put off getting a bike and just had that one ride until later in life.

So you fell in love with riding at 12 years old, but then decided not to get a motorcycle?

When I was turning 40, I decided I wanted to do something really cool for my birthday, so I learned how to ride. My dad had another motorcycle at that point, and I thought he and I would ride around together and maybe take some trips.

But I really loved going out on forest roads and camping, so I knew I needed a different bike than the Harley cruiser-style bike my dad had. After passing my license, I got a Kawasaki Super Sherpa, and then eventually a BMW G 650 GS.

What about the layout of the trip: Where did you go, and how much distance did you cover? 

The trip began in Revelstoke, British Columbia, in September 2015. I ended up crashing my bike 1,000 miles into the trip and breaking my wrist, which caused a three-month delay.

After that, I met Dave in Arizona, and we were in Mexico by December 2015.

By April 2016, we had traveled from Mexico down to the southernmost road accessible point in the world in Ushuaia, Argentina.

In May 2016, we went back to Canada and then rode to the Yukon and Alaska. After that, we had to go back home until January of 2017 to wait for our Russian visas, because you can’t leave your country without a passport.

Finally, in February 2017, we flew ourselves and the bikes to Cape Town, South Africa, and traveled up through Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Kenya. In May, we headed for Europe and rode from Scotland to Ukraine.

By June 2017, we were in Russia, and dipped down into Kazakhstan and Mongolia before ending the trip in Magadan, Russia.

In 2016, we rode through 15 countries, and in 2017, we rode through 25 countries, totaling 58,247 miles [93,740km].

A trip like this is a huge undertaking. What did you do to prepare for it?

Dave sold his house, and I sold my business. We really wanted to not have strong ties to anything back at home that might be distracting.

After talking to some other long-distance moto travelers, we budgeted about $75,000 total for the trip. Which equals about $18,000 per person per year, or $100 per day.

Some days we blew through that, especially when we did off-bike excursions, like boating around the Galapagos Islands or hiking up volcanoes.

Obviously, a trip like this is going to involve a few snags, and you allude in the excerpt to a major fall and wrist injury. What happened?

Photo: Riding Full Circle

I fell off my bike two weeks into the trip, and I broke my wrist. It felt like such a big deal because I’d been getting all these comments online, mostly from men, about how my bike — the G 650 GS — was too big for me.

So, in my head, I’m thinking, “Everyone was right. I’m too weak to muscle this bike. I can’t even get 500 miles from my house. How am I going to get around the world?”

That’s a huge setback, physically and mentally. How did you handle the situation?

I had to go home for three months until it healed. Dave stayed out and did some riding on his own, and then I met him in Arizona, where my motorcycle had been trailered to.

The first time I got back on my bike after the hiatus, I was scared shitless. What if it happened again? What if this time, I broke my leg, or worse? I didn’t want to just stick to paved roads, but that was where I felt safest.

Riding off-road terrified me, but the places we wanted to go — mountains, beaches, Baja, Mongolia — none of those were paved. I had to dig deep and basically become an entirely different person who didn’t care what people said and could control my inner thoughts about fear and failure.

Can you describe the experience of taking this huge trip with someone you just started doing life with?

It was a huge challenge. I am clear in my book Riding Full Circle: What the World Taught Me About Motorcycles, Risk, and Someone I Barely Knew that my relationship with Dave was rocky in the beginning. I felt he resented me for taking three months away from our trip to heal a broken bone.

He felt like I was too stuck in fear to advance in my riding. I was so slow, he often had to wait for me to catch up, and I felt like he was too fast for my comfort level.

At times, I wished he were more sympathetic, but eventually, the road ahead helped us start accepting each other. We had to if we wanted to achieve this goal together.

What were some of the other highlights of the trip?

Along with the incredible scenery and places we got to see, the top highlights of our entire trip were the people we met. When I broke my wrist, an older couple whom we’d just met for a few minutes at a gas station in Idaho invited us to stay on their ranch for part of my recuperation.

More than once, we were given free fuel from people at gas stations who heard what we were doing and offered to fill our tanks. People who had no clue who we were offered to let us stay in their homes.

It seemed every time we were having a bad day, someone would come out of nowhere with such genuine kindness and make us smile. You just don’t get that in everyday life at home.

There are probably so many different versions of this book you could have written, but tell me what this version is all about and why people should read it.

I wanted to write a book that told the truth about traveling as a new couple doing something extremely hard but also beautiful together.

Riding Full Circle was what we called ourselves online for social media. Originally, it was because we were going to start in Revelstoke, British Columbia, and end up back there 2 years later, completing a circle of sorts. But after I got home and started writing this book, I realized the trip had brought me full circle back to myself.

A self that — at the beginning of the trip, with all the insecurities that come from dating someone new and dealing with extreme physical and mental challenges — started to get lost. But because of those experiences, at the end of two years, she was back and stronger than ever.

You do not need to even like motorcycles to enjoy this book. There’s far more to it than that. Anyone with a partner will resonate with the experiences we had on the road while getting to know each other, both the good and the bad times.

This story first appeared on GearJunkie.