Talk to enough motorcycle world travelers who were active in the 1990s and 2000s and, eventually, you will meet people who knew Eric and Gail Haws, motorcycle travelers who were out touring the world long before it became a fashion and who hosted at least a few hundred motorcycle travelers at their home in Oregon over the years.
Eric and Gail traveled two up through countries on every continent, including across Russia in 1992 on their BMW, landing them in the Russian Guinness Book of World Records as the first people to cross the vast expanse of the country by motorcycle (they started July 3 from Magadan in Siberia and ended their 7,998-mile trip Aug. 22 in Helsinki. The record-setting portion of the trip was the 6,998 miles from Magadan to Moscow). The journey got them a bit of media coverage, including an article in the Seattle Times October 12 that same year (I can’t reproduce it here, for copyright reasons, but you should be able to find it with a Google search). This was at a time long before long distance motorcycle travel was something that landed you a TV show or thousands of followers on YouTube.
Eric and Gail also hosted motorcycles from around the world at their forested homestead in beautiful Westfir, Oregon, on the Middle Fork of the Willamette River, whenever such a motorcyclist might be coming through the area or during their an annual gathering, which started off as the Tynda Rally but that most people know as Burning Moto Man.
Eric died a few years ago, and it makes me sad that his legacy is disappearing. So I revisited an unpublished article I wrote about him, updated it, and published it on my own web site.
Happy New Year.
Leave a Reply