Why Group Motorcycle Tours Are Better Than Solo Ride?
Motorcycle touring has evolved from a personal adventure into a well organized travel experience that blends freedom with structure. While solo rides offer independence, more riders today are choosing organized group journeys for the value, safety, and depth they provide. One of the strongest advantages of riding in a group is the safety net that comes with it. Indian highways, high mountain passes, and remote regions can be unpredictable, even for experienced riders. A group setup minimizes risks and ensures that help is always nearby. So the main question is Group Bike Tour or Solo ride?
Professional tour leaders and road captains manage navigation and daily planning, allowing riders to focus on the journey rather than logistics.
Backup vehicles, medical support, and mechanical assistance reduce stress during breakdowns or sudden weather changes.
Riding in a convoy improves visibility on busy roads and offers immediate support in case of fatigue or minor accidents.
Solo riding demands constant decision making, route planning, and risk assessment. In contrast, group tours provide a structured framework where safety protocols are already in place. This is especially important in high altitude regions like Ladakh or Spiti, where altitude sickness, road closures, and fuel availability require expert handling.
Our friend @dougdpictures is on a solo bike tour of #NorthAmerica documenting American factory workers along the way with his camera. This is his fully loaded, custom built @brooklynmachineworks bike. Badass, right? Doug is a talented photographer and certified bike enthusiast and you should totally check out his page if you're looking for some inspiration. #biketouring #solobiketour #touringbike #handmadeinusa #madeinbrooklyn #brooklynmachineworks
Lady Bicycle Vagabond: Three Days' Ride from Atlanta
December 7, 2012
I saw, today, a great big mound of earth, three tiers high, each with the faintest brushing of pesticide-green grass. Mockery of Mayan tiered temples. Pickup truck on top & a little man against the brilliant clouding sky: still little bulldozer.
Then all the little men in all the little orange hats kneeling against the steel poles: the construction of the new bridge parallel to the old.
On the right side of the road, my stiff red dirt: on my left, the buzz of cotton, heavy-headed, through the glaze of trees.
Originally posted on the Swarthmore Daily Gazette.
Lady Bicycle Vagabond: Linn Cove Viaduct to Asheville
November 12, 2012
One has a certain sensation, when hitchhiking, akin to that of a fish seeking a hook. To get where one is going one will have to risk one’s flesh, risk at least the skin under the lower lip where the hook will punch in: one has the sensation that every car that stops will be a single man in a large, white, windowless van.
But I thought that—as a lone young white girl on a bicycle in the middle of the forest—I would have my choice of bait. What could be more harmless, what could appeal more to both matriarchal and patriarchal notions of pity?
They did not, I guess, want to ruin their leaf-watching. They wanted to sit & sit & be all eyes & then get out & eat lunch & take a picture & then sit some more. Fifteen minutes passed, then another. The cars did not stop. I adjusted Alexander so that he was leaning very clearly against me. I could not decide what expression to arrange on my face.
They would watch me from inside their passing cars, full, inevitably, of empty seats. I would watch right back at them, from the lip of the road, from behind my stiffening thumb, waiting to be caught. Then our gaze would meet at the glass of the passenger window: and they would not even slow down. I wanted to say: if you’re not going to give me a ride, at least don’t devour me as Something Even More Interesting Than The Foliage To Look At. Hard-to-say-what in their eyes, their gaze not like the gaze of passing motorcyclists, or the gaze of chewing cows. It was the gaze granted to matter out of place: some hitchhiking girl in the midst of the trees gone orange.
An hour passed. Then a pickup truck slowed suddenly and pulled onto the grass just ahead of me. Watch it be a lone man, I thought. A lone man got out. He was only going a few miles south, he said: that I should have a sign that read Asheville: he looked around the back of the truck for materials, stood up empty-handed. I think the only thing I can do is wish you good luck, he said, and pulled away.
The road to my right did not exist: that was where the North-bound cars came from. There was only the road to my left, bending itself around into the tunnel of trees. The grey of the pavement rose hesitant & still from the forest floor: & I stood staring each engine-sound into being. Every car going South came as one summoned. The road was a river that I could not cross and could not walk on. I could not swim.
A feminism-lite adage began to stir: a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. And a woman is like a fish when without a man but with a bicycle, such that her hands, from clenching the ram-horn handlebars, turn odd, fin-like, the index fingers twisting into the others, the thumbs suddenly wayward; a woman, hitchhiking, is a fish with fear of nets and hooks in lips, of ending up altogether as another’s dinner. She has, amongst other images culled from the road, that of a ten-foot-long-Jesus fish cut into a lawn somewhere three hundred miles east of here:
I had Faulkner on the brain, had Verdaman My Mother is a Fish-ing: how you know you are coming to a river when the road pitches down, there then the short dark cool as you cross, then the climb on up the other side: I was Addie’s dead weight, I was Dewey Dell’s bread in a basket: Anse in his obstinacy. A woman with a bicycle in a tent the shape of a coffin—there was Jewel, homeless & Socialist, the revolution blackening his back; there was, everywhere, the sudden specter of Sisyphus, of rolling down mountains. Hospitality: I don’t –ere a man.
A pickup truck pulled up beside me: the same man got out with a woman. Here: she said, brought you some cookies & a yogurt, & we made you a sign: ASHEVILLE in black sharpie on a white cardboard box top. & Oh! Kindness of strangers! If only Career Services could see me now!
Not fifteen minutes later I got my ride. Watch it be a lone man, I thought. It was a lone man. I promised my mom I’d text her the license plate number if I ended up hitchhiking, I said, pushing random buttons on my long-dead phone and feeling both ridiculous and very, very clever. We spoke in Spanish for 70 miles: Jorge, from Mexico, with a good job repairing software: then the ruins of a marriage. The mountains climbed up and fell away, passing by overlooks and a handful of (guiltily) bikers. Sometimes, a fellow liminar told me, you get the feeling that people help you out as much for their own sake: No quiero estar solo:
[in which the man with rounded eye, cigarette behind ear, slides into booth]
“Hey, whatcha writing?”
“About being a fish.”
“Like—metaphorically?”
“Sort of a reference to Faulkner.”
[defense mechanism: how delicious to be a feminist literati asshole]
“Oh. Hey–I like your hair.”
“Ok, thanks.”
“You know–I really love your hair.”
“Ok, well, I should probably get back to writing.”
“Hey, well, I hope to see you again.”
[still even sitting & staring across the interminable grateful table]
“Hey.”
[finger to eye finger to nose]
“Eye Nose I’ll see you again.”
[: I can see why Joan Didion went to write in bars: how on earth did Joan Didion go to write in bars]
Thanksroll: Teresa for the ASHEVILLE & cookies & yogurt (even with spoon), Jorge for the ride, Kyle & Joel & Jamie & Mike & Fig for the Southern hospitality, Asheville Public Library for the interesting range of liminars on view, Luna Moth is beautiful, Rosetta’s Kitchen for the rice & beans, Ellie for the paints, Iz for the thoughts, people of Dobra.
Originally posted on the Swarthmore Daily Gazette.
Lady Bicycle Vagabond: Greensboro to Linn Cove Viaduct
November 7, 2012
‘Boredom’ is a term for the sadly stationary. ‘Adventure,’ as in ‘quite an adventure,’ as in ‘sounds like quite an adventure [you’re having],’ has passed from overuse into the irrelevant. Liminar: ‘neither here nor there; they are betwixt & between the positions assigned & arrayed by law, custom, convention.’ Plan is a thing to pin down; to crucify; to push tacks through the brilliant blue wing of the tropical bird.
& everything is circumstance, everything unknowable:
Where the paved road turned gave way to gravel I met the liminar. Tim had fair hair & a big pack & rainbow waterproofing covers for his sneakers, & he was walking & then biking from the mountains to the sea: my route in reverse. We sat by the side of the road, pasture behind us, the Blue Ridge Parkway up a hill in front, sharing cigarettes and my sourdough bread wrapped in a red handkerchief.
In getting lost near Boone, I found, through Tim, some definitions I would need. Among ‘through-hikers,’ he said, there were Three Types of Fun. Type One Fun: fun to do and fun to tell about: how the couple who picked him up hitchhiking bought him a pizza at the Mellow Mushroom: how he ate the whole pie in one sitting. Type Two Fun: not fun to do but fun to tell about: how it rained for three days straight & he forded the swollen river naked, the water up to his neck. Type Three Fun: not fun to do & not fun to tell about: how it rained for three days straight & he had diarrhea the whole time.
We stood up from the dirt, he swung his pack up onto his back again, and he walked North. I crossed the road to bushwhack up the little forested hill to the Parkway: branches in every possible way, stubborn tender-footed Alexander the bicycle like a ram butting his head against every possible trunk (limitation: bushwacking)–
Then having finally made it to the road, saw some vague construction on the bridge over Goshen Creek; saw that there was only one lane open on the bridge, and it was empty of cars, and so not really thinking about it started across; and halfway over came a big long line of cars headed straight for me—heard a woman cry despairingly through the open window: what are you doing! Then an ominous crunch as the big dark van behind her struck the cement side wall. I dismounted and waited shamefully for them to pass. And this pattern of angering cars, of being on too-narrow roads, of not-really-even making it up hills, and of being, more than usual high levels, spectated upon, was to mark my brief (forty-eight hours) on the Blue Ridge Piece of Shit Way.
Limitation: mountains.
The plan was not the sort that is tacked lifeless behind glass. I had tied a single thread around the foot of the plan, long enough for it to fly around the yard a good deal but tight enough to ensure it would not fly off altogether. I would start off from Boone to Asheville on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a narrow two-lane road that runs some 500 miles through the Appalachian Mountains into the Smokies. The plan was to stick it out a day, see how my legs were holding up, and then possibly hitchhike the rest of the way.
3:57 pm Saturday October 20th—marooned at Wilson Creek, elevation 4,357 feet. Too much wind, traffic and no shoulder whatsoever but with beautiful views that one could only catch snatches of, no gas stations for funny encounters, and also, the hills: not hills, mountains. You know how when you’re biking up a hill and you can see the crest of it, where the cars dip over, and where you know the downhill starts? Not here. The road does not bend itself down just around the next corner. The road continues, impossibly up, as though someone had unfurled a scroll from their held hand, had let its end fall to the floor, and for some reason, you find yourself traveling, by bicycle, up it. You climb for miles at a time—five, ten—the cars heaving hot and impatient just behind, lining up, sometimes flooring it through the other lane.
I stopped at one overlook after another, asking vaguely for a ride: two good young families (mother w/ nose pierced, sipping beer, father Rayban’d, harmonica-playing). They did not know which way they were going; then they knew they were going North: Oh, I am going South, the little sad song of the one-human migration (land of 49-cent grits, the racialized soil, land of people who are all very kind but are all heading north–) Scroll, take me to Asheville, I thought: or I will cross my fingers and stick out my thumb.
It was four o’clock, five o’clock by the time I got to Linn Cove Viaduct Visitor Center. The gift shop sold four-dollar Clif bars and Blue Ridge hats. I bought stupid postcards of some lady on a motorcycle on Blue Ridge Shitway (young blonde Hitler Youth-esque ranger: It’s just like you but with an engine!). I walked Alexander around and around the parking lot, half-chanting my sad little song: I must have asked twenty (of only the safer-looking) rides, being reluctant to flat out hitchhike: Gee no we’re heading North or Gee we have a small car or Gee we have a full car.
It got on towards dark. The cars in the parking lot thinned; the bathrooms were locked. I grew more and more forlorn. The other ranger, a withered, white-haired, prune of a woman in her grey-green uniform, turned the sign on the visitors center to CLOSED. I went up to the door & [scowlingly]: Can’t you read the sign: we’re CLOSED: Yes–but I just have a question–is that alright: What [scowl scowl] is it: & I went into the store & stood timidly, the counter between us, feeling like a wayward student at the desk of the principal: Well you see, I am on a longish bike trip from Philadelphia to New Orleans (I am a student, I am taking a year off from college, I know to add quickly for credibility’s sake): & I had no idea the traffic would be this bad & it just feels really unsafe biking & so I’ve been trying to hitch a ride: I can’t have you (scowlingly) asking people for rides. I’ve had several visitors complain about it already: Well: it’s not like this is a situation I want to be in: I guess I’m just turning to you for advice: HONESTLY I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU: If you’re going on a journey like that–you’ve got to be prepared.
I did not explain my theory on the crucifixion of plans: I readied myself for a night of luxury behind the restrooms. As I was pitching my tent alongside the wall, a young mother with toddler rounded the corner & stopped: Oh—excuse me—they locked the bathrooms & he needed to go—Oh, hey, no worries, I’m just camping here illegally because I’ve been biking and my hands are numb—Oh— (she eyeing me so cautiously & pityingly)— and so eating handkerchief bread in the dark, too cold to get out peanut butter, then getting hurriedly inside, crying a good deal and reading As I Lay Dying a little, and not really sleeping for the cold wind sounding like the ocean coming up through the trees, like the rushing in-rushing out of a million trains: I managed, for a moment, to transform its hostility by thinking every tree a person I love—Ariel & Iz & Mommy & Zoe & Thomas & Liz standing right over me and doing their best with their lost leaves to break the wind: longing to record the sound, record the cold in my toes, for the most accurate representation of travel by bicycle.
Dawn behind camouflage print. Sounds of bathrooms being cleaned, the door not ten feet away around the corner being opened and a wheeled thing being pushed around; half-slept, & faintly in my hearing so many car doors were being slammed I imagined it to be a long line of doors, all leading to nothing & all attached by a beam at the top, running the length of the parking lot, that someone would walk along and open and slam at random. I am hesitant to label anything Type Three Fun, but let’s say the Blue Ridge was, on average, a solid Type Two Point Six. Every possible bit of bone ached. It was Sunday.
Thanksroll: the Ralph family for housing & feeding me, your son was right about the ice cream, David at Sandy Springs Baptist Church for letting me pitch my tent there (and was it you who left the egg sandwich in my helmet–still warm when I woke), Pal and Miles Ireland at the Cook Shack, Andrew Jackson for the rad palling around, Brandon and Chloe for housing me and letting me bake handkerchief bread, Tim for the tips.
What, they ask, do you think of when you’re riding?
: as I pass by field after field, trailer home after trailer home. There are little kept lawns with grinning frogs, frogs sitting cross-legged on benches holding fishing poles, chipped plastic deer, inflatable ghosts rising in & out of inflatable pumpkins; two-foot-high pageboys holding lanterns, plaster Grecian women of similar stature bent delicately forward under the weight of the amphorae on their shoulders, mailboxes with plaques dangling the resident family’s name—real, monosyllabic, American names—Jones, Watts, even, O ubiquity of ubiquities—Smith. The pickup truck, still everywhere; so, too, the stately blue R of the Romney-Ryan yard sign.
It must get boring.
: the developments in the suburbs around Raleigh: gated communities, or, for the more adventurous of heart, fenced communities— big new houses, with three-car garages, pools behind white fences, clipped hedges in beds of mulch, Hampstead, Silver Creek, Blackwell Manor, written in big cursive lettering on the sign out front (framed by more clipped hedge) & lit softly from below—impossible to see any more in, privacy as privilege—
You must get lonely.
: there was a woman sitting out front & a small dog laying down in front of her. Out front of the shop (MACK’S GAS MARKET now no longer selling gas, the GAS on the sign having been crossed out) there was stacked six feet of brown boxes, to the left of the woman & the left of the dog, poster Re-Tooled Pack Same Classic Taste USA Gold poster Interstate Batteries Authorized Dealer and in front of them, between me and the woman with dog, a golf cart plastered in stickers, Nascar Coble ’90 then two desk chairs & one rolling chair by the boxes: insert here the standardized conversation: you going a long ways on that bicycle, yeah I guess you could say that, I’m heading for New Orleans, well—New Orleans! Well—where’dyou start at? Philadelphia, Well I’ll be LORD HAVE MERCY YOU CAME FROM PHILADELPHIA ON A BICYCLE yes.
The bathroom was a little blue-walled shed out back with no sink & no lock but it did have a space heater turned on full blast. Imagine that! No place to wash hands but the heat cranked on (red rods glowing) in the hottest part of the day, even, when there was no need.
The mechanics had come out & stood now in the shop looking on in their dark blue overalls with the little name patch above the breast pocket: Mack eating a sandwich. Hard to say what the shop now sold: shelves of packaged cake & muffin bits, chips & nuts & such, one whole wall filled with little old car toys, Coke bottles, framed pictures Band-Aid boxes in range of colors, oil tins & packs of cards. That sure is a lot of things what a great collection. Pa been collectin all his life & do you sell them? Not much sometimes those antique cars: Mack: Seems like nothing I ever did ever turned out right now Pa you know that’s not true—
Sounds like a lot of time to contemplate God in all His mystery, the Christians say.
: there were a great many big black birds by the road & all bent at once over a central thing, & when I drew close they walked at first away a little ways & then drew themselves heavily up into a tree (when I took out my camera they knew to fly at once across the road) & what it was was a deer, on its side, the eye gone from the socket such that there was simply a hole that went through its head, that let in light, even, the bottom jaw eaten away to bone (the teeth all there); & there were clean stumps on the head where someone had come by & cut off I guess the antlers, & I did not know that in death the fur falls in such folds, as a curtain dropped to the floor, away from the off-white windowpane ribs—the right front leg unnaturally long & yellowed, actually detached from the body, actually turned the wrong way around such that the hoof touched chest: imagine that in death someone put your arm wrong side round such that your hand was stuffed into your armpit (that the flies flew circles round your ribs & came out the hole where your eye was) & that ten yards up was the great red stroke along the road:
: & where a box of Ziploc bags had exploded, most concentrated there where the box had come open–& the grass filled with clear-white blown things all along the road with fewer as I got further from the box: there is in short no time for thought, there is only ever image & lung & the great unknowable of the gathering shapes of the birds in negative.
Thanksroll:
That copperhead for slipping quietly back into the grass, everyone at the Tipsy Teapot for letting me kick around, the very humble Greenville parade for existing & the thirteen-year-old emos in skeleton gloves for joining & then disappearing, that brown recluse spider for staying on the side of the church and not wandering into my tent, Marshall for housing me & feeding me almonds, everyone at Calvary’s Cross Baptist Church for letting me pitch my tent there, Elwood for the place to pitch my tent & water & sweet potatoes, Ed for the blueberries, Ora & Kit for the lovely spontaneous hosting & company, Mark for letting me sleep by the Quaker cemetery & eat my grits with banana, Elsewhere for its very existence, Alyzza for the novelty that is a real bed & the card-house-building-in-a-dive-bar.
Originally posted on the Swarthmore Daily Gazette.
