The towering trees and winding roads of Sequoia National Park are on the itinerary for this ride east of Fresno. There are interesting things to see and great stretches of road outside the park boundaries as well. The route starts at the desert elevation of 300 feet above sea level but climbs high into the Sierra Nevada. It’s a three-season ride (in winter, roads are impassable on a motorcycle). A $ 30 entrance fee for motorcycles is valid for up to seven days for both Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.

Escape from the busy and noisy Big Apple metropolis into the picturesque, relaxing farmlands and forests of northern New Jersey. Experience beautiful mirror lakes and running streams in the unspoiled wilderness. Small, rustic towns and villages will take you back 100 years. View the majestic Buttermilk Falls and ride the historic Old Mine Road alongside the mighty Delaware River.

Our starting point is Pine Mountain State Resort Park in Pineville, KY. It’s mid-March, and the mornings are expectedly chilly. Marisa and I quickly find ourselves shedding additional layers of clothing as the sun warms the Kentucky hills, but as we descend into deep, wooded valleys, where the morning sun doesn’t fall, we feel the temperature drop sharply.

This story started in 1999, and it’s quite special to me. It’s a story of four friends who are more like brothers, who have somehow managed to keep riding together even when life tries to get in the way.

Anticipating our journey to Greece, we were expecting to see the whitewashed buildings with blue rooftops clinging to the coastline—the scenes that we knew from pictures. But those iconic sites are found only on two specific islands, and Greece has literally thousands of islands. We traveled the mainland and got to know the real country behind the postcard images. It’s mid-September when Fabio and I arrive in Athens, Greece’s capital and largest city. Some 5 million people live here; that’s half of the country’s population. It’s a bustling place. There are no high-rises along the skyline. Instead, faint-colored buildings with flat roofs dominate the view. Towering above the city on a flat-top rock, 492 feet above sea level, the Acropolis citadel, crowned by the Parthenon temple, can be seen from far away.

Some of the earliest humans who migrated to North America occupied the high desert region of Northwest New Mexico. Remnants of ancient structures and other historical artifacts bear testimony to the presence of the Ancestral Puebloans, a pre–Columbian Native American civilization dating to about A.D. 100. The area also is home to present-day Native Americans. There is visual evidence of geological upheavals that occurred millions of years ago.

Over the years I have motorcycled through many of the world’s most exotic places, but in recent years I have been dithering about options for the next great ride. Can you hear a bit of desperation there? Finally, I was presented with a new road I could not refuse, Canada’s conjoined Dempster and ITH (Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk) highways. This road, following the route of earlier Royal Canadian Mounted Police dogsled patrols, offers some 560 miles of gravel layered over rock and fickle permafrost from Dawson City, Yukon, to a dead end at frigid saltwater at the Arctic Ocean in the Northwest Territories. A road through the Great White North where I might be shivering instead of sweating? Awesome! Tourism ads call the Dempster/Tuk highway “Canada’s Northernmost Public Road.”

I was predisposed to like this bike, as I fondly remember the edgy original Katana, a groundbreaking design that stunned the moto world in 1982. That first model is one of the most memorable motorcycles of the last four decades. There’s a reborn Katana for 2020, and there’s much to appreciate about this new one.

With its new Challenger models, Indian Motorcycle has definitely shown that it is a strong contender in the heavy cruiser-bagger category. The Challenger was designed to compete directly with Harley-Davidson’s Road Glide models, and this introduction can be considered a shot across H-D’s bow.