Elspeth Beard > Quotes

“Turn back, I told myself. It’s not too late. Go home, a persistent voice in my head insisted, back to the family and friends who never wanted you to leave.”
― Elspeth Beard, Lone Rider: The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World

“Every day was spent ticking off sights in the guide. Churches, castles, altarpieces, rare rock formations – if they featured in the Michelin guide we visited them. Normandy, Brittany, various other obscure parts of France and Scandinavia – my siblings and I saw them all, never questioning my father’s obsessive need to tick off every entry in the guide. Every night we’d arrive at a new campsite, erect our tent, usually in the dark, eat from our tins and go to sleep. In the morning, we’d pack away the tent, get back in the car and do it all again, every day for a fortnight, every year without fail, except when my father once got sunstroke and we stayed at one campsite for two nights. It was bliss.”
― Elspeth Beard, Lone Rider: The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World

“2014 I was contacted out of the blue by an agent in Hollywood, who had found the article on the internet and expressed an interest in buying the rights to my story, with a view to making a film about it. In October that year I was invited out to Los Angeles as a guest of the actress Kate Moennig and her associate, Bradley Bilanin.”
― Elspeth Beard, Lone Rider: The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World

“It was for times like this that I loved riding my bike. Those moments when all thoughts of the past and future slipped away and I existed entirely in the present, the miles rolling past beneath the wheels of my big BMW, the morning light clear and golden, throwing shadow bands across the road as I carved my way around the world. As I rode and the days and miles ticked past, I spoke to my bike, cajoling her with promises of an oil change and a clean air filter if she got me to Penang in time. It was the kind of bargain I’d struck many times since leaving London nearly eighteen months earlier.”
― Elspeth Beard, Lone Rider: The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World