Ron Rutherford’s 1971 trip from NZ north through Sth & North America to UK/Europe
 

Hi from Taupo on the central plateau of New Zealand’s North Island.

This is my 1st ever post and what I wanted to do is help give a nod of respect to a real traveler I bumped into yesterday.

I bumped into Ron Rutherford totally randomly when waiting outside a supermarket in his tiny NZ town of Ohakune. He came up to chat with me about my bike and it emerged he was this bold, early motorcycle overlander from 1971. He just felt like doing it and then did it. There wasn’t a book, a blog, a vlog, no YouTube, Insta. In fact no other motivation involving anyone else other than his ageing grandparents he wanted to visit in Scotland.

He invited me back to his place and I learned more about his journey.

Here’s a website somebody’s put up for him https://www.rutherford71.com/

Ron kept all his maps, a few photos and maintained a detailed diary, but he hasn’t yet commercially published anything. The website above shares his diary verbatim, save a few misinterpretations by the writer (rather than the author).

I asked Ron about HU and other well known motorcycle overlanders. He pulled out a few of Shirley & Brian’s books and was aware of Ewan & Charlie’s journeys. However, he seems pleased to have his experiences shared and is curious to hear comparisons between what he encountered in 1971 on his Triumph and what travellers see today. He’s elderly and it would be a shame if his story wasn’t told more widely.

I’ve passed these details to Jim @ ARR too.

I have his mobile phone number if anyone is interested in contacting Ron just let me know.

Follow your front wheels - Steve

Great job, Steve. What a gem. I’ve read the first two pages and it looks like a solid read and no doubt fantastic story ahead. Well done taking the time to meet Ron properly and then share here and ARR. Callum from Auckland.


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Just been reading the first bit of Ron's notes. 1971 does seem an awfully long time ago - particularly when you see how much money he set off with! When I look back at what we were doing that year I find it hard to believe I'm the person in some of the pictures. :rofl: You want to reach in and warn your younger self about the bumps in life's path that are just round the corner.

What I find interesting is not so much that Ron wrote detailed notes on the trip but that they've survived. Unless there's some kind of string of continuity - for example, a family house passed down the generations where the notebooks were abandoned in the loft and found afresh decades later - I think it would be unusual for most people to still have this stuff. House moves, decluttering, 'what do you want to keep that old stuff for' spousal decisions, even jealousy / revenge (something that did for some of my photo albums over the course of a breakup), the stuff just vanishes. We (or the curly haired girl in the picture below anyway) journaled our trip to Greece that year but it went with a parting of the ways afterwards. I don't suppose she kept the notebook but who knows, it might be in an attic somewhere. It would be interesting to look through now - particularly as she wouldn't let us read it at the time :rofl: Whether it was a record of the trip or purely a succession of character assassinations only she would know! You remember the broad sweep of the trip of course, and any surviving photographs help, but the fine details are very quickly lost. Much of that is the stuff you went on the trip to experience in the first place.


https://i.postimg.cc/KvVpvpL0/1971-2hp.jpg

(somewhere in the Greek mountains)


https://i.postimg.cc/rw0f1qZs/1971-3a.jpg

(campsite somewhere near Athens)

Amazing the people experiences you collect when you travel on a motorbike right?! I don’t know how common it was back then, but he never met another motorcycle traveler until reaching Texas! Different world and he had no thought of recognition, tribute or profit: that makes it a great story to me. Reminds me of a time before the gap year & instagram crowds. Old school proper.

Hey @backofbeyond you were doing it when Ron was doing his thing. Respect. Ron is still around, he was running a mountain bike rental out of his home / shed / workshop until 5 years ago. Now he’s taking it easier it seems and these items from his trip seem to have been his treasure he finally has no more excuses not to do something with. His wife passed away in 2014 I recall him saying; she apparently challenged him to just get on with it. The fact he preserved everything may also he connected to how remote New Zealand was/is and therefore the “once in a lifetime” value placed on the experience- that would make a great question for Ron if ARR or TeapotOne got him on a podcast.

Pretty much the same with us - nobody on the road doing the same thing. We were so unusual that this happened the previous year on the way back from Morocco.

https://i.postimg.cc/Mp61VF1n/1979-7.jpg

I remember a lot more about that earlier trip than I do about the '71 trip and a few years ago wrote it up as a short book ('short' being about 25k words) when I was bored over the winter. I'm lucky in that I'm still in touch with the person I went with so I could mine his memories / photographs as well. We did many more trips together (+/- WAGs) afterwards - particularly through the '70 and early '80's but continuing right up to the present day. The last 'big' one was in 2017 around eastern Canada but Covid cancelled a planned trip to the US Deep South last year.

It is strange how some of the things you experience while travelling can have a lasting effect on you and often they're not the things you expect. For me the lasting consequence from that 1971 trip was not so much to do with the people I went with but something that came from a very brief stop in the Alps on the way back. It triggered a love of the mountains that led me to buy a second 'home' down there many years later.

https://i.postimg.cc/yNWPBd6g/DoE2-2.jpg

Excellent! Thanks for sharing.

Not even close however I'm recalling my travels in Southern Africa a couple of years later on an ex-Police bike... : )

wow, thankyou for the link, I read a few pages and cant wait to deep dive through this.

Paulo

I've read up to the point where he is in New York, and I am struck by a couple of things. One is how unbelievably many punctures he has; at this point in the trip he has had dozens, if not hundreds, of flats.

I realise that tire technology has improved greatly since 1971, but he is literally getting multiple flats per day, and doesn't seem to go more than a couple of hundred miles without having to fix his tire.

The other thing that strikes me is how often he is offered a free place to sleep for the night, or a free meal. It seems like every other town he rides into, the local police, firefighters, or just some friendly bloke offers him a place to stay for the night.

Every now and then I read something that really opens my eyes, such as this line: "At a roadside lunch stop, we meet a man on a Harley-Davidson Sportster with a tent. His name is Mark, and he’s heading for Florida, having a job lined up on the construction of a new Disneyland there." Which of course would be Disneyworld...

Or this sentence a few pages later: "We go there by ferry, past the Statue of Liberty in the haze, the Twin Towers full height but not completed." Wow!

A cracking read - thank you Ron and Steve.

Just what i needed stuck at home atm.

thanks for the link. beer

You’re welcome. Apart from honouring a person of great ambition, this is why I shared it here. Cheers

I wasn’t planning on writing any sort of diary but perhaps this is a good reason to do so. -the photos are the aide memoire but the diary can provide the timeline and more flesh on the bones that the photos have evoked. One thing that I am reasonably confident about is that the diary will not be put onto Facebook on the whole - some bits very likely but not as the primary diary for the journey.

If you are going to keep notes of how a trip has gone with the intent of using them to write it all up afterwards, or even just to remember the fine detail, you'll have to work out a system that you're comfortable with. If you've ever read any of Paul Theroux's books you'll probably have realised that he writes everything down in a succession of notebooks - interviews, impressions, spellings, the whole lot. That's the advice aspiring writers are given; write everything down, relevant or not, and mine your notes afterwards.

I've tried doing that and still have a couple of 99c notebooks I bought at Walmart a few USA trips ago, but I quickly realised that after thirty years as a professional photographer my note taking with a camera was a lot more insightful than a few hastily scribbled lines in a gas station. At 'our level', where the trips are almost entirely for pleasure, sitting and writing everything down at the end of each day can feel like it's taking over - and if you're travelling with a non writing partner who wants to head for a bar / restaurant while you're still scribbling, can be quite divisive. Do it long enough and at some point exactly what you're doing the trip for will become a topic of heated conversation.

What worked for me for the books I've done is to use a camera (a few actually, but mainly a small pocket thing - not a phone) whenever something catches my eye, or I can see a story line developing, but keep a notebook for the things you can't easily capture - people's names for example, or conversations or stuff you can't realistically photograph (the Pizza Hut waitress with no teeth we met in West Virginia for example).

Even with the length of a book available these things can only ever be a truncated version of what the trip was actually like, a linked series of verbal snapshots. You end up having to pick and choose what you write about. Making my notes in image form has always given me enough material to work with. It also opens up the possibility of a photo book of the same trip, so instead of a writing book with pictures you can flip it over and do a picture book with writing. One 'advantage' I hadn't considered until recently was when I sent off some pictures I'd taken on trips to a motorcycle photography competition. I won a prize - a book! (The Motorcyclist's Guide to Scotland. I think second prize was two copies :rofl:)

One final practical piece of advice on note taking - use a pencil. On a US trip in 2015 I made most of my notes with a pen. That was fine until we got soaked through in a storm in Tennessee. The notebook got so wet the ink ran and I lost what was on the bottom half of each page. :(