Life in Motion with Rodney Myers and his motorcycle

Sunday, June 19, 2016: Father's Day Day Two of heading to Gathering of Eagles, Cruiser Club, USA's Annual Gathering, held this year in Fort Wayne, Indiana is still kind of a Blue Collar mile day, but it will be much more enjoyable. We started the morning by heading out of our hotel and crossing Interstate 75. We would see far fewer super slabs today. Our bellies were full, and my Honda VTX 1800c, as well as my chase vehicle, with Kasey and her daughter Rose inside, needed full tanks to start the day. So we set out heading west on the Russell Dyche Memorial Highway. A quick Google Search yielded that Russell was a local journalist during the early two thirds of the 20th Century. He was also a conservationist, and gave part of his salary to create an area park. I would say that is worthy of having a stretch of road named after you. The road sweeps back and forth through Kentucky foothills and leads us to Somerset. Her we start heading north on Highway 27. In Danville, Ken...

Saturday, June 18th, 2016 Day One of the trip to Gathering of Eagles, Cruiser Club, USA's annual gathering, is often a blue collar day, or a turn and burn day. The point is to get some miles behind me, and have fewer on the day or days that follow. Also on this trip, I had Kasey, not in the seat behind me, but in her car with her daughter. If you do the math, you will see I couldn't get three people on one bike, let alone all the luggage. We left Locust, North Carolina on Highway 24/27 heading west. The sun was rising behind us, and the June air was already warm. It was a Saturday, so traffic was not too heavy, except for everyone heading to Lake Norman. We would follow that flow of traffic on to the Outer Loop of 485. Going counter clock-wise, we would go from the three o'clock position to nine, and take the ramp for Interstate 85. One of the few times you will hear me riding on a interstate. As I said, blue collar miles. Near King's Mountain, we split off the Inte...

Originally published in Southeastern Rider Magazine, June 2016 Most of us have had to state this answer: “If I have to explain it to you, you wouldn’t understand.” I have said it, and I know a lot of fellow riders who have made it their go to answer for the question: “Why do you ride a motorcycle?” I have been riding since I was five years old, so the answer listed above is as good an answer as any. I do remember that the freedom, and the thrill I feel today was not there. It could have been that my parent’s front yard didn’t offer a lot of freedom, and the thrill was replaced with the amount of concentration I needed to just stay upright. I remember trying to perfect the art of turning. I would go straight across the front yard, turn the handle bars, lean over, and fall right on the ground. I didn’t waste time with embarrassment or wiping off the new grass stains, instead, I would just pick up the Honda Trail 50, turn it around, kick start the engine and head back across the yard. ...

Saturday, May 14, 2016 It's not often that you get to celebrate the 175th Anniversary of anything, so when it comes up, it's time to take a ride. Did I also mention the festivities are surrounded by one of my favorite riding destinations? If you cruise up to the look out at Morrow Mountain State Park on a Sunday Morning, you will see that I am in with a lot of company. The beginnings of this great motorcycle gathering spot don't start in the hills of North Carolina, but across the Atlantic in Prussia. Franz Joseph Kron was born there in 1798. At the age of fifteen, he and the French were expelled, and Kron landed in Paris. Eight years later, Franz would marry Mary Catherine Delamothe, and her uncle would invite them to come live in America. Henry Delamothe had lived in North Carolina and had become very successful, so the lure of an inheritance helped to make the couple decide to move. After Kron finished medical training, he moved back with his uncle-in-law on the ea...

Sunday, April 17, 2016 Once again, if you have been reading and riding along, you know that my favorite riding partner and I like to ride to State Parks. One of the reasons is to check out potential camping spots. With that in mind, we decided to head south of the border, the one between North and South Carolina, to check out a potential tent setup. We started south on this Sunday Afternoon down State Road 200, through Locust and Stanfield. We veered to the right on Morgan Academy Road. We were a little surprised the road didn't have a reference to a church in it, since it seemed all the roads around here did. We joined up with State Road just before New Salem. In New Salem, we turned to the left, and headed down Highway 205. Not any kind of interstate or anything, just country road with a State Number to identify it. We meandered on this ribbon of asphalt until it ran us into Marshville. We made a little jog in town, and exited heading south on White Street, whic...

Originally Published in Southeastern Rider Magazine, April 2016 This past summer, 2016, my family and I picked up from Danville, Indiana, a small town west of Indianapolis, and moved to a small town east of Charlotte, North Carolina. I had lived in Indiana since birth, covering a lot of miles of the Hoosier Landscape.   I can only think of a couple Indiana’s ninety-two counties that I have not visited on two wheels. I called this tricky little bit of pavement "Sheldon's Switch". It is on Sheldon Road, not too far south of Indianapolis. I already know what you are thinking about riding in Indiana: nothing but straight roads that divide   The Hoosier National Forest and many limestone quarries consume a lot of the southern land. The southern border with Kentucky winds along the Ohio River. corn fields. With lots of exploring, I was able to find a lot of great roads in the nineteenth state. Indiana can be characterized into three sections: The north section deliv...

Saturday, March 12, 2016 For those of you that have read about my rambling about Indiana, you know one of my favorite destinations are Covered Bridges. While in the Hoosier State I did a lot of visiting and research about the spans and the men who built them. I was working on a documentary about the builders, and I can remember one day that I was trying to think of other ways to say Covered Bridges. Sheltered Spans is what I came up with, I even liked the alliteration. So today I set out on The Black Pearl to find my first Covered Bridge in North Carolina. I had really thought visiting these old passes were gone from my riding days. I didn't think North Carolina needed them since the weather conditions are not so harsh. The weathering of the wooden structures is why they were covered in the first place. So after my favorite riding partner, Kasey, took this photo, we hit the road! We hot the road, heading north on 200, and quickly left the town of Locust, North Carolina. ...