Beach’s Motorcycle Adventures allows a rider to pick a route and ride at their leisure, either solo or in a group, to the day’s destination.

Today’s ride will be on a road race course, and we’ll be riding in the opposite direction than the racing cars,” I said to Gwen. 

“Wait, what do you mean? We’ll be riding toward the race cars? How does that make sense?” she responded with apprehension. 

Gwen’s cause for concern was valid. She has always been a bit averse to racetracks. However, closed-course racetracks are relatively safe for a number of reasons: the traffic goes in the same direction, there are no driveways or intersections, you can almost always see through the turn, the track is clean of debris, and other reasons. But she knew the road race I spoke of wasn’t on a closed course and didn’t have any of those built-in safety features. It was an automobile rally course on public roads, with extremely sharp, blind corners: rock walls on one side and drop-offs into the abyss below on the other.

This breakfast conversation happened on Day 12 on the French island of Corsica during a tour organized by Beach’s Motorcycle Adventures. Operating since 1972, Beach’s is the oldest motorcycle touring company in the world. It was started by Rob Beach’s parents and today is operated by Rob and his wife, Gretchen.

THE ISLAND INTERLUDE

The 16-day tour, dubbed The Island Interlude, began in the Tuscan city of Fiésole, Italy, a suburb of Florence, at the end of September and ran until the middle of October. Over the course of the next couple weeks, the tour group — which included Canadians Gary and Sandra, Randy and Donna, Rob and Dianna, Sam, Matt, Bonnie and Mike and, of course, me and Gwen, along with Jim and Rebecca, Janet and Glenn, Don and Jo, James and guides extraordinaire Rob and Gretchen from south of the border, while Lefty and Nicoleta, both from Greece, manned the support van — would make our way west through Italy to the port city of Livorno to catch an overnight ferry across the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Italian island of Sardinia. 

After circumnavigating much of Sardinia we rode to the north end of the Island to catch the short one hour ferry to the south end of the French island of Corsica. After a few days on Corsica, we set sail once again back to the mainland of Italy and back to Fiésole.

A TOUR COMPANY LIKE NO OTHER

The tour began in the centuries-old Pension Bencistà high above the city of Florence. Pension Bencistà dates to…