In this section you can read about:
- each of the pack members,
- the decision to go from a corporate life to full time travelling
- the detailed travel plan
- the preparation
- our goals and expectations
The humans
Rag and Sophie (aka Ken and Zsofi) met in the IT support business and have worked as managers together in various large corporations ever since. Sophie was living in Hungary at the time, and Rag was based in the UK. With an expert amount of blagging, we found a way to end up in the same country, working for the same company.
Sophie: the operations lead
Sophie was raised as a city girl in Budapest, Hungary, and has spent time living abroad in Canada, US, the UK, and the Czech Republic. She has always had a thirst for travel and is always restless, unless she sees the next challenge in front of her, which she creates for herself. Although a dreamer, she can also be quite analytical, especially regarding finances. Needless to say, she is in charge of costs; if this were Rag’s responsibility, it would be a short trip. Sophie will never be a successful poker player because whatever is on her mind is usually written all over her face.
Before Snow White (the Triumph Tiger 900 GT Pro) she has always ridden street bikes for everyday commute as well as touring. Quickly adjusting to the wind factor that comes with riding a naked bike she loved the speed and manoeuvrability in the city. However Snow White immediately took a special place in her heart and by now she cannot imagine not riding an adventure bike.
She doesn’t like coffee, wine, or whiskey but enjoys lemonade and ice cream. She hates shopping or owning things she doesn’t think are needed. However, she does love to socialize and try new things; give her a zip line or a tent, and she will be happy.
And of course, she is a dog lover and does a fantastic job at ensuring that the “kids” (Ricky and Molly) are healthy and that their papers are up to date to allow us entry into the countries we visit.
Rag: Coffee and early morning ideas
Rag was born and raised in a small fishing village in the North East of England but was raised a Scotsman by his larger-than-life Scottish mother. Trips to Scotland to see family were constant history lessons etched into his soul. However, being raised in Yorkshire adds a unique outlook on life, not to mention a very peculiar English accent that has had to change over the years to allow people to understand him when delivering training classes around the globe.
Half of Rag’s life was spent in the security industry and the other half in the corporate world, with both careers being quite successful. His favourite job was as a forest ranger because he prefers the great outdoors. It’s not hard to see why hitting the road on a motorcycle might be appealing to him.
Rag loves coffee, beer, and whiskey, and he is passionate about his toys. So, you can imagine how hard it is for him to leave some of his gadgets behind.
Most of his time is spent writing, route planning, and finding accommodation. So, if things go wrong, we know who to blame.
His philosophical approach to life is a comedic glass-half-full, even if the glass had a chip in it and the handle was missing. He has the patience of a saint, which is very much needed when you marry a fiery Hungarian woman who waits for you to have your morning coffee before she starts bombarding you with ideas she had at 4 a.m. that morning.
Rag has been riding motorcycles from an early age and has put many miles on the road. Yet, he still knows nothing about mechanics, so this adventure could be a real learning curve for him.
Started with a KTM250, before moving on to a Thundercat 600. After a sport bike it was only fair to try and adventure bike and a Varadero XL soon became a trusted partner on some of the long journeys. During the quiet years of COVID he switched to a Suzuki GSX 950, which was probably the sexiest bike he ever owned, but less convenient to tour with. Therefore he swapped it for a Triumph Tiger 900 Rally Pro, which much like Sophie, he absolutely fell in love with.
The furry companions
Traveling with us in their very own motorhomes (dog box on the back of a bike) will be our two Border Collies, Ricky and Molly. We have always felt a level of guilt when leaving our pups behind to go on another adventure for a couple of weeks. Sophie’s mother has always been our go-to person for dog sitting because she knows how to handle them (and when I say handle, I obviously mean spoil). There was one occasion when she wasn’t available, so we had to employ dog sitters. This nearly resulted in us turning around and heading home because the sitters weren’t quick enough to respond to us, and we vowed never again!
Now, with our new pooch carriers, we never have to worry about leaving them behind again. We did think about trailers behind the bikes, but we didn’t want the dogs breathing in our exhaust fumes all day, and we still wanted some agility when sitting in traffic, especially on a hot day when you need that airflow to keep cool.
Ricky: the big bear
Ricky and Molly are very different characters with a two years separating their ages. We adopted them from the same rescue team, Ricky was only 5 months and was up for adoption once his owners realised he was deaf. We of course fell in love with him and had to adopt him. He has learned hand signals that we have taught him over the years and we are so in sync that his condition has never been an issue. He is a proper mummy’s boy and, for a Border Collie, is pretty much lazy. His hobbies include eating followed by a snooze, light walks followed by a snooze, eating dog treats followed by a snooze, and sleeping on the nearest foot or leg he can find. He is not big on being stroked by strangers and prefers to be left alone. He will let you know when he is not happy, so please keep all fingers in the carriage at all times. We have invested in a warning scarf for him that he wears around his neck with pride, hoping it will deter anyone from approaching him. He is not a vicious dog; just leave him alone, and he will leave you alone. This attitude comes to us all at some point in life.
Molly: the hyper
Molly, on the other hand, is quite the character! She is nuts! This is a dog that thinks everyone is here to see her and loves the attention. She loves the bike and has even taken to wearing goggles. She rides with her head out of the window most of the time, with her tongue flapping in the breeze, which means she gets plenty of protein on our trips. We call her the sheriff because if anything is kicking off, she needs to be in the middle of it, sorting it out and giving her opinion. This is a huge step up from the reactive dog she was when we rescued her at the age of 1,5. She wasn’t in great condition, so it took a long time for her to settle into our pack and become the little super hero she is now.
Molly has an irrational fear of thunder, loud bangs, and fireworks. You might say, “Why irrational? Most dogs have this fear.” But Molly will try to escape by any means necessary, even climbing up onto a shelf, half destroying a kitchen, and flooding a bathroom because she wanted to stand on a water pipe. This might be her biggest fear, but it is now also ours, along with health and injury issues for all of us. We don’t want to run into any thunderstorms with her on the back of a bike, and we will be paying close attention to the weather forecast daily.
Recently, we had some thunder while she was outside, and she jumped the fence in our garden. We couldn’t find her anywhere and didn’t know what to do. Then we had an idea! We just started Rag’s bike, and she was back in a flash! She truly is a biker dog; it’s just a shame about the incessant barking every time we stop and start again. She has a bark that could shatter glass, and it’s usually right next to Rag’s left ear!
As well as our stories, we will bring readers Ricky and Molly’s antics from the road and how they are coping with life on the bikes.
The decision: from Corporate Life to Travel Full-Time
The story is not unusual: after spending years building successful careers, we started to become a little disillusioned with the sector we had chosen and began to dream of something bigger than the usual 9 to 5 (don’t we all). Sophie was a former flight attendant, and Rag has always looked for adventures by motorcycle. This is something that Sophie has also become addicted to since passing her motorcycle test over a decade ago.
Our holidays for the last decade or so have always been about touring on our motorcycles. To date, we have covered the UK to Hungary and back again twice, the UK to Luxembourg, a tour of Transylvania, and a tour of Italy. Recently, we have covered quite a bit of the Balkans with our Serbian friends. Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Croatia are incredible places to visit by motorcycle and have become some of our favourite regions to explore by bike.
Touring the world by motorcycle was always a dream and never much of a reality, especially as we have two Border Collies that we just couldn’t leave behind. Then one day, we heard about a couple who had been doing just that and now had a business that manufactured and sold dog carriers for motorcycles. Suddenly, that dream didn’t seem so far away. A seed had been planted in our brains, and ideas were starting to form. What if we sold the house and all our possessions? How long could we last on the road? Would the dogs take to riding on the back of a motorcycle?
Fast forward a few months, and the house was sold within a week of being on the market, which brought our timeline forward. Possessions were sold, and the dogs were trained to use the Pillion Pooch carriers!
We can’t deny that the recent trips we have taken to the Balkans have played a big part in our decision to hit the road permanently. The roads, the people, and the locations were the perfect ingredients for some of the amazing adventures we’ve had in the last couple of years.
Ragthered Detailed Travel Plans
… well as detailed as it gets. We plan to set off and head towards Bulgaria to spend a week or so there. Afterward, we’ll head down to Greece. From there, we will travel back up to Albania to catch a ferry over to Italy and spend some time touring Sicily before heading up the west coast towards France, then Spain, and eventually into Portugal, where we will stay for the winter. During our stay in either Spain or Portugal, we will plan the next leg of our trip for the spring.
We are quite excited to see the Black Sea in Bulgaria, as this is an area we have never toured. Greece has always been a favourite, but we have never managed to visit by bike. Spain in the winter will be something very unique for us. When it comes to points of interest, we really want to meet people and get a local’s perspective on what to visit and what to eat and drink. It’s all about the people!
If we manage to be sustainable while traveling, we plan to head to the Nordics, Asia, and maybe the US in the following years. This will depend on our dogs and any legal requirements for country entry, such as mandatory guides in China, etc.
Preparation for the Journey
The decision to sell the house was not easy, especially after spending the last 20 years building a life and collecting all our worldly possessions. Moving house is hard, but selling items with sentimental value is no easy task. Nevertheless, we had to make some hard decisions and powered through. The house sold very quickly, and our household items were sold through social media, word of mouth, and yard sales.
In preparation for our new adventure, the first obvious step was to swap our street bikes for touring bikes. It took some time to sell our bikes, especially Rag’s Suzuki GSXS for some unknown reason. It was a beast of a bike and lots of fun to ride, especially around the Balkans. Unfortunately, you need an iron butt to travel long distances on it, so it had to go.
After many months of research and bike comparisons, we finally chose two Triumph Tiger 900s. Sophie opted for the GT Pro, while Rag went for the Rally Pro—two very capable bikes that can handle almost anything. In addition to the bikes, we also purchased upper crash bars for the Rally Pro and a full set of crash bars and a belly pan for the GT Pro. We also bought side panniers, crash bar bags, and tank bags for our luggage. We hope this will provide enough space for the four of us.
We are no strangers to traveling long distances by bike and are fully aware of the problems you can face on a journey, so little preparation was needed to get used to this.
The dogs, on the other hand, needed a lot of practice getting used to the dog carriers, but they took to it very easily. Ricky, our deaf Collie, just gets in his box and goes to sleep. Molly, on the other hand, is hyper and barks every time we stop and start again. Let’s just say we will not be sneaking out of town ever!
The real challenge was packing the right amount of essentials, balanced with minimal luxury items—Rag’s travel coffee maker, for example. We don’t intend to camp just yet, so you would think we’d save some space, but we still need camera equipment, dog supplies, and clothes for both winter and summer. This is something that will work itself out over time.
Goals and Aspirations
Why are we doing this? For so many reasons! Our love of travel, seeing new places, and meeting new people might sound cliché, but it’s all true. Over the years, we have visited places we thought might be a bit dubious, only to find incredibly friendly people from different cultures, equalled only by their amazing locations and wonderful roads. Sometimes it’s hard to put into words when something like this happens, which brings us to the second reason for the blog. We want to take readers on our journey and do our best to describe what we discover in the hope that people will be inspired. Note that we didn’t say inspired to travel, buy a bike, or start a blog. We just want to inspire people to do something they’ve always wanted to do and maybe thought it was too late to chase a dream.
Through our blog and social media, we hope to bring you stories from the road about us, our travels, the people we meet, the things we see, and how we manage it all by motorcycle with two dogs.
Our plan is not to have too much of a plan but just enough to get by. We want as few limitations as possible, not because we don’t like rules, but to ensure we have the flexibility to wander off and see whatever we want or simply follow our noses for a while.
We don’t want to just tell stories and share pictures; we want to meet people and hear from our viewers. We want to hear their stories too so that we, too, can be inspired by their thoughts and ideas.
Neither of us has been big users of social media in the past, so there is still much for us to learn. This includes content creation and gaining viewers and subscribers across various platforms. We don’t have any desire to be rich and famous; we just want to share what we are doing. We have never been afraid of hard work; the difference now is that we will be doing it for us.
Expectations
We expect to experience a new level of freedom with our family on the road. We look forward to discovering a new way of life, seeing incredible places, and meeting amazing people. We hope to achieve a kind of calmness that puts our souls at rest and gather some fantastic stories to share along the way. That said, we also understand the reality of taking on an adventure like this, including vehicle issues, getting lost, health issues, and finding a way to remain sustainable. It won’t be lying on beaches sipping cocktails surrounded by unbelievably friendly people while the dogs frolic in the water. This will be a hard adventure, but we hope that the freedom and good things we discover will outweigh the bad ones we try to avoid.
If our plans change somewhere down the road, this life will hopefully give us the luxury of being able to take a breath, think about what we want to do next, and then just go out and do it!
Contact and chat
If you have stories, thoughts, or ideas you would like to share with us, check out our social media section and drop us a line. We hope to stream on Twitch once we get into a rhythm and we love for you to join us for a coffee while we are streaming, and we can have a full-blown conversation.
We would also love to hear from fellow riders out there who would like to meet up and show us around their local area, telling us a bit about life and motorcycles in their region.