Elspeth Beard
Solo trip around the world on a BMW motorcycle
The autobiography of Elspeth Beard was amazing. She was the first English woman to ride a motorcycle, solo, around the world. While she was finishing up her college degree in architecture, she decided that she wanted to do the unthinkable, ride a motorcycle around the world by herself.
She was an avid motorcyclist, having taken several long tours around Europe. So, in 1982 she shipped her BMW R60/6 from her home in London to New York and headed west across the United States, on to New Zealand, Australia, and across Asia to Europe and then finally home in England.
Over those three years and 35,000 miles, she met with a wide variety of challenges including wrecks, illnesses, thieves, floods, and terrible road conditions. She met an amazing array of people along the way. Even armed with a British passport and being a British citizen, she still had days and weeks of delays getting travel documents for many countries due to bureaucratic bungling. It would be harder today for an American because a USA passport is not as widely accepted as a British passport and with the combative nature of the current administration, Americans could be less welcome.
In 1982 there were no cell phones, no internet, and no GPS, and only rudimentary maps in some places. Also, few places accepted credit cards so she had to have cash in the local currency everywhere she went.
She made a few interesting observations along the way. The most amazing thing was that the people in the poorest countries, in the most dire conditions, seemed to be the happiest. In the wealthier or more advanced countries, the people were more rushed, stressed, and generally unhappy.
The big surprise was that when she got home, even though she felt like a completely different person, few people showed interest in the things she had done and seen. Her own parents hardly noticed that she had been gone and immediately went back to their personal lives without even asking where she had been or anything about the trip.
She tossed her journals and photographs in a trunk and didn’t look at them for over thirty years. In the meantime, she became a successful award-winning architect with her own architectural design firm. In 2017, she decided to get out all her notes, journals, and photographs and write her story. It was published in 2019 with the title “Lone Rider: the first British woman to motorcycle around the world.”