Lone Rider

 I've just finished "Lone Rider; the first British woman to motorcycle around the world" by Elspeth Beard. 

It's a nice book, proper legitimate autobiography: she gives the sense that she’s not sugar coating the events of her younger self, no matter how cringy, and she’s not concluded the book with some exciting epiphany, but charted how she adjusted back to a more conventional lifestyle and how the ride influenced her going forward. 

Much of the book explores her emotional life rather than the difficulties of riding or the complexities of motorcycle maintenance. A major theme of the book focusses on her efforts to juggle her relationships with two men, both of which she has close relationships with.  Her association with the bike is a consistent theme throughout the book and forward to the present: she still owns it. 

She glosses over a series of maintenance jobs that without some experience might seem trivial. She devotes only half a sentence to replacing the steering head bearings which she did in Turkey while recovering from jaundice. We might also say that in the hotel carpark she disassembled the front end of the bike, removing wheels, forks, instruments and handlebars, hammered out and replaced a pair of bearings that normally require a series of extractors and presses to manipulate, and had it all reassembled before the locals could interfere or nick tools. Non trivial!

Her bike, the R60/6, is a direct ancestor of the R65LS. Happily she relied heavily on a Haynes manual both to learn about and to maintain her bike: my much later edition of the manual includes maintenance instructions for both her bike and mine. 

She and I both fell off a BMW in bulldust riding westwards through Central Queensland in the 1980s. She completed her ride not just across Australia but back to England. I subsequently blew the rear main seal, limped the bike back to my home in New South Wales, and completed the continental crossing by train. I am somewhat in awe. 

The book was written and published as part of a sequence to see the story told on film. Maybe, hopefully, we can see it on the big screen. 

There are a number of interviews of her available, this podcast on Airhead 247 on Soundcloud is good. She has a website.