2024 ended up being the year I wanted 2023 to be. After coming up about 600 miles short of riding 20,000 miles in a year in 2023, I finally surpassed that personal riding milestone in 2024 – and rode a little extra to amass 40,000 miles in the previous two years combined.
In addition to achieving a goal I’ve been aiming for since 2017, I also participated in the Tour of Honor for the second consecutive year, rode to Denver and back to have dinner with a friend, rode the Mount Washington Auto Road, completed another Iron Butt Association ride and visited the Barber Museum for the first time in eight years.
Though 2024 marked my eighth attempt to ride 20,000 miles in a calendar year, finally accomplishing that goal was as much a feeling of success as it was of relief. I love riding, but my life has changed a lot in the last eight years. Becoming a homeowner, spending more hours at work, becoming a pet owner, having a side hustle (that mostly requires weekend work) and the like has made it more taxing to rack up that many miles without feeling stressed out with everything else I need to get done. There would be short rides I’d want to do but would have to put them aside to make sure I got the maximum number of miles on each weekend day.
As I looked back on my years of riding, I realized even when I was a graduate student with few firm time commitments, I still averaged about 10,000 miles each of those years. Doubling that with less time to spare – working a full-time Monday to Friday job, working a part-time job, having a side hustle, living in a northern climate with an about half-year riding season and owning a 75-year-old house – was a test of the will. I’m just happy I get to head into the 2025 riding season without the burden of that goal hanging over me. I did it, it’s done, I’m proud of it – and now it’s time to enjoy new types of adventures.
My second-favorite memory of this past riding season was my four-and-a-half day, 2,868-mile ride to have dinner with a friend in Denver. When I did my nine-day, 4,900-mile Out West tour in 2023, I’d planned to visit my buddy Dan when I rode through Denver. Unfortunately, Dan had to head back to Allentown, Pa., that weekend, and I wasn’t planning to head back out west for at least a couple years.
I had been planning a mini tour for 2024 to knock out a bunch of the roadside attractions I wanted to see along the way – so that when I did do the full ride to Denver, I’d be able to skip them and make it to Denver with as few stops as possible. Eventually, I questioned why I wasn’t just riding back to Denver in 2024 and squeezing in as many of those stops as I could. I changed my other travel plans for the year – such as switching my Johnny Cash tour from the northern Great Plains to New England – and inserted the Denver dinner ride into my schedule for early September.
The ride to Denver included stops at the Iowa 80 Truck Museum near Davenport, Iowa; the Danish Windmill in Elk Horn, Iowa; and the Golden Spike Tower at the Union Pacific Railroad’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Neb. Dan and I met at FlyteCo Tower in Denver’s Central Park neighborhood for dinner. We watched the MotoGP race from earlier in the day in a restaurant and arcade that’s located in the air traffic control tower for Denver’s former Stapleton airport.
The ride back east was a bit of a whirlwind due to time constraints, but I did get to stop at the Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles in Lexington, Neb. During the trip, I made sure to fit in stops at my favorite eateries in the central and western United States – including Taco John’s, Kwik Trip, QuikTrip, and Maverik.
The Johnny Cash Ride to New England ended up being what I wanted it to be. I rode in three states for the first time (Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine), completed Johnny Cash stops in Chicopee, Mass., Boston, Mass., and Bangor, Maine, and photo-documented having ridden in Connecticut.
The highlight of that tour, though, was finally getting to ride the Mount Washington Auto Road. That’s something I’ve been wanting to do for at least a decade, and it was a very unique experience. It’s striking how much colder it is at the summit than at the base of the mountain, and the ride down the mountain on a motorcycle wasn’t as intimidating as I’d feared. The more pronounced engine braking on a bike made the descent pretty uneventful – though I did smell some car drivers’ brakes cooking as they went by me when I was riding uphill. The views along the way and at the summit were amazing, and it wasn’t even a perfectly clear day.
One of my other tours in 2024 was to the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Birmingham, Ala. Billed as the largest motor sports museum in the world, I hadn’t visited it since 2016 when the “new wing” was still under construction. While I’d been to the on-site Barber Motorsports Park several times during those eight years, I didn’t have enough time to give the museum a proper visit. The sheer size of the Barber Museum demands booking a full-day, open-to-close visit to just be able to see the entire exhibit. The museum was just as impressive this visit and it was on my first one, and I really liked the off-road and drag racing motorcycle exhibits that are housed in the new wing. I also used the Barber tour to make a total of five Buc-ee’s stops at four different Buc-ee’s locations (Smiths Grove, Ky., Athens, Ala., Birmingham, Ala., Richmond, Ky.), as well as re-did Johnny Cash stops in Knoxville, Tenn., Chattanooga, Tenn., Louisville, Ky., and Nashville, Tenn., and the state of Tennessee for better photos.
The combined Iron Butt Association SaddleSore 1000 (1,000 miles in 24 hours) and BunBurner 1500 (1,500 miles in 36 hours) I completed in June was an unorthodox ride plan due to getting home a lot later on Friday night from a get-together than I’d planned on. I ended up riding the shorter, 500-mile leg first on a Saturday from Cleveland to Kanona, N.Y., and back. I was up early the next morning to do the 1,000-mile portion of the ride, which took me from Cleveland to the outskirts of Knoxville, Tenn., and back in a day. I’m still waiting for the official certification from IBA, but I’m sure it’s coming shortly.
I was only able to make it to part of one day of the Motorcycle Sport Touring Association’s inaugural Tusky-Musky Rally in New Philadelphia, Ohio, but had a great time in my first time attending the club’s River City Ride in Corydon, Ind. The riding in that region isn’t super technical, but the endless sweepers on a bunch of the roads were a lot of fun.
My other tour for 2024 was my annual trip to visit friends in Allentown, Pa. I also completed day rides to visit Hell (Michigan) and Fort Steuben in Steubenville, Ohio. I made it to several MSTA Ohio lunch rides, did my annual Gio’s BBQ run (this time on back roads) and rode to AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days and the MotoAmerica round at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. I also just barely got in a little time at the Sunday edition of Fuel Cleveland. It took four rides to complete the 2024 Ohio Tour of Honor, but I made it to all seven stops.
