A recent re-watch of an old movie may have identified where my obsession with motorcycle touring began.

2024 hasn’t exactly been a banner year for me with regard to motorcycle touring. Instead, it’s been a non-stop conveyor belt of tasks to complete. Most of those tasks revolved around our move from Ann Arbor, MI to Cedar, MI, a preemptive jump to our retirement location because both Karen and I were allowed to work our respective jobs remotely. The year looked something like this:

• Make 26 trips between Ann Arbor and Cedar to prepare the new home for move-in, incrementally trailering up as much of our stuff as possible.
• Get laid off from my job in April.
• Make the final move (Uhaul, not a moving company) into the new home in May.
• Take the year’s one (single, only) motorcycle trip to Chesapeake Bay for Memorial Day (late May).
• Spend a few weeks back in the empty Ann Arbor house getting it ready for sale.
• Work the long list of tasks to enhance/modify/fix items in the new Cedar house (still not done).
• Contribute computer skills to the effort to host the National Model Railroad Association in the Detroit area in 2025.
• Search for a new job.

Given the list above, there wasn’t time for multi-week motorcycle adventures, or even our normal camping weekend escapes.

With the arrival of fall came the college football season and we had retained our season tickets for University of Michigan home football games. Where we used to simply walk the 10 blocks to the stadium, now we had to pack up the camper, travel downstate, camp for the weekend, and attend the game using the camper as a weekend headquarters. At least this got us out in the camper for a few weekends.

Last weekend Karen and I had returned to our campsite after Michigan beat in-state rival Michigan State. The game had been a night game, so it was already approaching midnight, and we were still wound up from the exciting game. Jessica (daughter) had been holding down the fort, watching movies with the dogs. She’d just cued up an old Charlie Brown movie, Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, and we settled in to wind down to the movie.

The basic plot to the movie is that Charlie Brown and the other kids go off to summer camp. Charlie Brown’s dog, Snoopy, who is the coolest dog on the planet (he is Joe Cool, after all), doesn’t ride in the bus with the other kids. Nope. He and his bird-friend Woodstock ride to the camp on a gnarly chopper that looks a bit like the Captain America Bike from Easy Rider.

So, I’m watching these Snoopy motorcycle scenes and started to recall how I felt about them back when this movie came out in 1977. I distinctly remember thinking that it was so cool that Snoopy had packed his belongings on this bike and was riding across the desert and into the mountains on this motorcycle. There was even a scene where the bike starts to run rough and Snoopy stops by the side of the road, pulls out a tool roll, turns some wrenches, and gets the bike running again. My 11-year-old mind just loved the independence and adventure of it.

For context, at that point I did not have a motorcycle yet. In fact, I only had an old Schwinn Manta Ray five speed bicycle.

I would eventually graduate to a real 10-speed bicycle that could accommodate a rack and saddlebags for proper touring. That would be my venerable Schwinn Traveler III. It was chrome-moly instead of steel, like the Schwinn Varsity, so it was significantly lighter. (I searched everywhere for a photo of the Traveler packed for a trip, but couldn’t find one.)

I would take several camping trips on the Traveler, learning to deal with flat tires and bike repairs en-route. I can’t help but view these trips as the junior varsity training for the long distance motorcycle touring that I would eventually pursue with such enthusiasm.

Anyway…

Rewatching Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown triggered a bit of nostalgic introspection. I couldn’t help but think that this could be the touchstone, the inception of an idea that I would play around with on the Traveler, and subsequently carry to fruition on the Cruiser.

Damn that Snoopy. He was just too cool.