Gregory Frazier - Down and Out in Patagonia, Kamchatka, and Timbuktu: Greg Fraziers Round and Round and Round the World Motorcycle Journey

My off-road adventures began in 1948 by my not knowing my personal riding envelope or the limits of the vehicle I was driving.

My thirst for a bicycle, though, could not be squelched by merely lacking enough monthly allowance. I came up with a plan and pitched it to my parents. If they lent me the money to purchase a bicycle, I would pay them back from what I earned by delivering newspapers, for which I needed, of course, the bicycle. For me, it made sense.

A deal was struck, and I became a newspaper delivery boy, riding my three-speed Raleigh bicycle through the neighborhood after school on weekdays and early on Sunday mornings. It took me less than a year to pay back my parents.

The side benefit to having a bicycle was I could explore neighborhoods far from my home base when not in school or tossing newspapers. The bicycle was my ticket to freedom from a strict disciplinarian father and his militaristic household.

My grandfather had been a physician, working for the government on various Indian reservations. My father was to follow in his footsteps, but after he froze his feet walking out of the Chosin Reservoir Campaign in Korea in 1950, his career in medicine was abandoned for a job as a government bureaucrat, possibly accounting for his stringent household demeanor.

From as early as I can remember, my parents insisted that I had to carry on the family tradition of going to medical school after college and becoming a physician to make up for my fathers inability to do the same. Education was a priority in our household, and I strove to achieve good grades so I could be accepted at a college.

I soon had to give up my lucrative paper route. We moved to Billings, Montana, where my father was promoted within the government bureaucracy, but thankfully I was able to keep the bicycle. I was a 14-year-old peddling fool, and I rode my bicycle as often as I could to stay away from the rod my father threatened to use to ensure good grades in school.

I met a girl at school. Her name was Sam, and she was the kind of woman whose body was a magnet to anybody with a pulse. She had sharp features, long black hair, and an hourglass figure. Between my youthfulness, raging male hormones, and the girls interest in me, my parents were finding my absence from home the reason for lower grades at school, and the bicycle was wrapped up in the center of this. It made me mobile, and mobility brought me to her. Sam was two years older than me, smoked cigarettes, wore a black leather motorcycle jacket, and was the coolest girl in our school. She looked like she had walked out of the movie The Wild One. Her disdain for what I saw as the mediocrity of life drew me to her, away from the rod and heavy hand of my father at home.

In 1948, my grandfather gave me the Indian name Sun Chaser for trying to catch the sun in the backyard of our house using my four-wheel scooter.

She liked motorcycles, had been the girlfriend of a motorcyclist at one time, and asked me when I was going to get one so she and I could go riding. I knew nothing about motorcycles other than what I had seen in movies. What I did know was I was going to have to acquire a motorcycle if Sam was to become my girlfriend.

Mike, a boy in one of my classes, owned a moped. It was a 50cc Allstate sold by Sears, Roebuck and Company. Mike and I became friends and he sometimes let me ride on the back of the bike. After several months I managed to talk him into letting me drive the moped, alone. It was a wobbly start, but my bicycling skills managed to keep the moped upright long enough to feel more than a pedaling breeze in the wind. That first solo ride hooked me on motorized two-wheel movement. I also felt I qualified as a motorcycle rider, the kind that my cigarette-smoking and leather-jacket-wearing girlfriend wanted.