In a back yard in Alaska sits a sad and lonely motorcycle called Tony the Tiger.
He hasn’t been started for three years, needs some serious TLC, and if bikes have feelings, which I’m sure they do, must be wondering what he’s done to deserve this after he had such an exciting start in life.
But hopefully he won’t be sad and lonely for much longer.
You see, Tony is the Triumph Tiger 955i I rode the 16,500 miles of the Pan-American Highway from Chile to Alaska in 2006 for the book The Road to Gobblers Knob, which you can still find on Amazon and is most folks’ favourite of my several bike adventure books.
He was christened Tony by Clifford Paterson, the former TT racer who was my companion on that trip and named his Aprilia Pegaso 650 April using the same logic.
As for Tony, he was on loan to me from Triumph, and the deal was that at the end of the trip, I’d leave him with The Motorcycle Shop, their dealer in Anchorage, Alaska, and they’d sell him on to recoup some of the cost.
As you can imagine, I was almost in tears when I walked away from that bike after all we’d been through.
Unpacking the bikes at Valparaiso docks in Chile, feeling like boys on Christmas morning.
Leaving Quellón, the start of the Pan-American Highway, with everyone in town there to wave us goodbye.
The long days through the Atacama Desert with the warning light on and the bike regularly refusing to start, like in baking heat at the Chile-Peru border. The problem eventually turned out to be fuel contaminated by diesel.
Crashing in Colombia and sitting bleeding beside a wrecked Tony, sick at heart and sure the trip was over. And then the moment Diego the mechanic in Cali started the engine again, and we knew we could go on.
The nightmare at the Mexican border, when Clifford didn’t have the right documents to get through. The glorious feeling of riding away from that, and the even more glorious feeling of crossing the border into the States.
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The moose that leaped out of the trees in British Columbia and missed me by an inch, then the bitter cold in the Yukon, and finally reaching the end of what had been the longest and most difficult journey of my life.
I had often wondered what became of Tony the Tiger in the years since then, until finally I stopped wondering and got in touch with The Motorcycle Shop to ask.
The shop’s Andrew McConnell put me in touch with JD Williamson, who’d bought Tony and loved the bike, but had another bike, hadn’t ridden the Tiger for a few years and said he’d be happy to sell it to me for not very much, partly because it needed a new piston ring, and partly because he loved the idea of me having it again.
By another happy coincidence, another biking buddy, Peter Murtagh from Dublin, is on his way from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska on a GS as I write, and expects to be there in August before riding across the States. You can see his blog at https://tip2top.ie/.
So my plan is to fly from Dublin to Vancouver to Anchorage in August with Air Canada, pick up the bike, meet up with Peter, ride the 2,200 miles to Vancouver and ship the bike home from there.
What an emotional moment it would be to see Tony the Tiger again and press the Go button. Fingers crossed it happens, and if it does, you’ll read about it here.
Until then, hang in there, Tony. Help is on the way!
