Made In America Tour Home

For our Summer 2006 riding season we decided to try something new.

Every year the American Motorcyclist Association sponsors
a series of contest rides/do-it-yourself tours.
You sign up for the desired contest(s), and they provide you
with a list of places, things, clues, names or
whatever information that particular ride requires.
The goal is to accumulate points by photographing your bike
at as many of the locations as possible.

The great thing about these rides is that we are
remodeling our entire house, and the house
simply refused to allow us our usual weeks-long sabbatical
for a lengthy motorcycle adventure.
This trip let us have a summer full of fun little weekend rides,
and along the way we found great places we had never been before
and beautiful roads we'll surely ride again.

Sounds straight-forward
enough, right?
But keep paying
attention, because this is
the part where we usually
lose people.

The ride we chose was
called "Made In America",
and here's how it worked:

As you may or may not know, the US has been home to
a great many motorcycle manufacturers over the years,
most of them pre-WWII and most of them now defunct.

Our goal was to find towns (or cities, neighborhoods, counties,
municipalities of some sort) whose name is the same as that
of any of the dozens of now-expired American motorcycle
manufacturers on the list provided to us by the AMA.

We had to get a picture of the bikes in front of a sign clearly
indicating the town's name, and the minimum needed to
complete the challenge was 15.

Got it? Good, 'cause it gets a little weirder.

As a special challenge, we needed to figure out
15 current motorcycles manufacturers from anywhere in the world
that do not have a town in the US with the same name.
For example, there is a town called Honda in California, so we
could not use Honda. With this challenge, we could get our
picture of our motorcycles with any sign depicting the
manufacturers name; it did not have to be a dealership sign
or anything directly related to motorcycles.

Are you still with me?
If not, I'll try to explain more as I go
because now it's time for pictures...

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