American Borders: A Solo Circumnavigation of the United States on a Russian Sidecar Motorcycle by Carla King

If you’ve been coming here for a while and have read any of my other book reviews you’ll know that I love reading and reviewing motorcycle travel books with a passion.

You’ll also know that Pete and I have a certain affinity for Ural Motorcycle Sidecar outfits (or rigs as they say in the US).

So imagine my delight, dear reader, to discover a book that combines these two topics – heaven!

Carla King is a motorcycle adventurer and writes about her travels at her own blog Motorcycle Misadventures.

In 1995 when Ural were just starting to sell sidecar outfits in the USA, Carla got the opportunity to ride one and report back to the company. She decided to circumnavigate the borders of the United States, a 10,000 mile trip, by herself and write about the journey, and this is the book that I find myself reviewing for you today.

At the beginning of the book Carla gives a little background about herself revealing that her first solo motorcycle trip, around Europe no less, came about by default when her then husband backed out of the planned trip at the last minute.

She admits that this took a certain amount of bravery, more than perhaps I would have, but explains why she had the courage to do this trip.

However, as with anything that you might have a certain amount of fear about, the actual doing of the thing often turns out better than you could have imagined.

It seems that Carla comes from adventuring stock as her Grandparents circled the United States for their honeymoon. That was in 1927 and when barely anyone had cars let alone travelled any distance in them. In one particularly poignant moment in her adventure Carla gets to hear a recording of her Grandmother’s voice, at a local history group, talking about their honeymoon trip.

In those days there were not the abundance of petrol stations and places to stay that there are today and indeed they had to camp out a lot of the time.

Carla managed to give me a feeling of the character, scenery and weather of the United States combined with her own feelings about the journey itself and the people she met, plus information about the motorcycle and the adventures she had with it which I felt was just the right balance for a travel book and certainly gave me the inclination to travel in the United States in the future, surely the objective of any travel book?

The book covers lots of information about the Ural motorcycle and sidecar and the breakdowns, which although not really plentiful in a trip of that length, did require most of the time for Carla and the bike to be taken by recovery truck to the nearest town to seek assistance.

This was not really problemmatic whilst she was in the United States, but when she crossed the border into Canada and there were vast amounts of open space, and she inevitably broke down between towns, it did get challenging.

On the end of a phone and able to despatch advice and spare parts was Randy from Ural. Carla was brought up understanding machinery and therefore was adept at carrying out most repairs herself only having to rely on garages a couple of times, this undoubtedly saved a lot of time and meant she was more self reliant.

Before you start thinking the Ural was a total disaster on three wheels, several of the breakdowns were the same thing, that just took a while to diagnose, and for a lot of the latter part of the journey it was relatively trouble free.

As with any motorcycle trip she got to meet lots of people, either on their own journeys, or holidays, and also enjoyed spending time alone enjoying the experience. Rarely did she find herself in a challenging situation as a result of being a female travelling alone and rather she discovered that people are generally friendly and happy to help out if needed.

Of course the unusual nature of the Ural motorcycle sidecar outfit means that people tend to want to have a conversation with you about it, which is still the same almost fifteen years later.

We both love that rareness of them that means barriers of communication are abandoned and that kids want to sit in the chair and have their photograph taken whilst adults want to ask you about it.

Carla’s journey inevitably resulted in some improvements to factory processes and building of the Ural motorcycle outfits, which has resulted in the reliable machines being produced today.

I can certainly recommend the book and you can get your own copy from Amazon by clicking here.