There were beautiful views along the spine of the Ozark Mountains. Photo by Rick Koch.

?You realize that we?re moving to mandatory evacuation,? the park ranger told me as I pulled up to the campground kiosk to check in. It was August 2020, and Hurricane Isaias was bearing down on the East Coast just as I was about to start my ?Adventure of a Lifetime.? The storm was expected to make landfall right where we were standing at North Carolina?s Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

A month earlier, my KTM 500 EXC-F had been loaded on a truck in Louisiana, bound for Outer Banks Harley-Davidson. I had flown into Norfolk, Virginia, with plans to pick up my bike and spend a week at the beach with friends before starting my solo journey on the TransAmerica Trail.
Now I was doing battle with cars and RVs trying to outrun a hurricane. My KTM was overloaded with an expedition?s worth of gear plus a now-pointless beach towel, umbrella, mask, and fins, making it as unwieldy as the rattletrap jalopy of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. I made my way north along the Outer Banks and felt lucky to snag a room at an overpriced roach motel in the ominous-sounding village of Kill Devil Hills.

First day of the TransAmerica Trail: baptizing the bike in the Atlantic Ocean.

I had heard that the pavement ended just north of Corolla and from there you could ride on the beach into Virginia, so I got an early start and baptized my knobbies in the Atlantic brine. The plan was to ride west ...