My Motorcycle Misadventures began when I was 14 years old in rural North Carolina. I identified the broken down old Honda enduro in the barn as my escape vehicle and my dad said “If you can fix it you can ride it.” He helped me do just that and I rode through the tobacco fields to the woods and the creek and to the edge of town and back almost daily, sometimes falling down and sometimes breaking down, and either fixing it or walking it home...

More about Carla

The China Road Motorcycle Diaries
The mountains of northern China beyond Beijing are vast and enormous. There are no road signs, only larger roads and smaller roads, paved roads and dirt roads. When I stop to ask directions the peasants simply stare because I am the first foreigner they have ever seen, and a woman, and by the time I find a bed to sleep in I'm too tired to care that it's in a brothel...

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American Borders
In 1995 I traveled around the United States on a Russian Ural sidecar motorcycle that was designed in 1938 and built in 1994. While I could have chosen a more conventional and reliable motorcycle, the Ural enticed me with unique qualities from a previous era — the graceful lines, the sidecar, the sound of its engine. I’d ridden many bikes since I learned to ride as a teenager, but I had never actually traveled by motorcycle until I was 28, when I somewhat accidentally ended up alone in Europe. Because a woman traveling alone is an oddity, and doubly so if she is traveling by motorcycle, people often ask, “Aren’t you scared?”...