273: Motorcycling Adventures with Kerri Miller
Description
02:28 - Kerri’s Superpower: Having an Iron Butt
06:39 - On The Road Entertainment
- FM Radio
- Country Music
- Community/Local Radio
- Roadside Attractions
15:11 - Souvenir Collection & Photography
- Fireweed Ice Cream
- Clubvan
- Lighthouses
- National Parks
25:42 - Working On The Road
27:37 - Rallies, Competitive Scavenger Hunts
30:40 - Tracking, Tooling, Databases
35:36 - Community Interaction; Sampling Local Specialties
- Cinnamon Rolls
- Salem Sue, World’s Largest Holstein
38:40 - Recording Adventures
- Kerri’s Blog: Motozor
- Stationary & Sassy (Jamey’s Podcast)
41:46 - Focus / Music
- Bandcamp
- Steely Dan
- Neil Peart (Rush)
42:22 - Directed Riding vs Wandering/Drifting
Reflections:
Mandy: Taking time to enjoy yourself is SO important.
Jamey: Get started! Create a map, now.
Coraline: Permission to go down rabbit holes: wander aimlessly, and explore.
Aaron: If I’m not having fun, why am I doing this? Resetting expectations to your purpose.
Chelsea: Making “it didn’t always look like this!” stories accessible to folks.
Kerri: It’s a marathon. You can’t do a lot of things in a single step. We have traveled far from where we began.
Greater Than Code Episode 072: Story Time with Kerri Miller
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Transcript:
CORALINE: Hey, everybody and welcome to Episode 273 of Greater Than Code. You may remember me, my name is Coraline and I’m very, very happy to be with y'all today and to be with my friend, Jamey Hampton.
JAMEY: Thanks, Coraline. I'm also excited to introduce my good friend, Aaron Aldrich, and it's our first time co-hosting together so I'm excited about that, too.
AARON: Oh, Hey, it's me, Aaron Aldrich. I'm also excited. I'm so excited to host with all these people and I will introduce you to Chelsea.
CHELSEA: Him folks. I'm Chelsea Troy and I am pleased to introduce Mandy Moore.
MANDY: Hey, everybody. It's Mandy. And today, I am here with one of my favorite people! It's Kerri Miller, and you may know Kerri as an engineer, a glass artist, a public speaker, a motorcyclist, and a lackwit gadabout based in the Pacific Northwest.
Generally, she's on an epic adventure on her motorcycle somewhere in North America. Will she meet Sasquatch? That's what I want to know and that's why she's here today because we're not going to talk about tech, or code today. We're going to catch up with Kerri. If you're not following Kerri on these epic adventures, you need to be because I live vicariously through her all the time and you need to, too. Kerri is a prime example of living your best life.
So without further ado, Kerri, how are you?!
KERRI: Oh my gosh. With an intro like that, how can I be anything but amazing today? Can I just hire you, Mandy just to call me every morning and tell me how exciting I am?
MANDY: Absolutely.
[laughter]
KERRI: No. I'm doing really, really well. The sun actually came out today in the Pacific Northwest. I've been telling people lately that if you want to know what living in Seattle is like, first go stand in the shower for about 4 months [laughs] and then get back to me. So to have the sun bright and it’s 53 outside, it’s amazing.
AARON: 53 does sound amazing. It's been like so far below freezing for so long here that I've lost track. Every once in a while, I go outside and it's like 30 and I'm like, “Oh, this is nice!”
[laughter]
JAMEY: Are we going to ask Kerri the superpower question? Because I feel like she's come on and answered it a bunch of times already. [laughs] We could ask her about Sasquatch instead.
MANDY: I mean, I thought her superpowers were having epicly awesome adventures, but maybe she has a different answer.
KERRI: Well, in the context of this conversation, I think that my superpower is being able to sit on a motorcycle for ridiculously long amounts of time.
CORALINE: Kerri, would you say you have an iron butt? Is that what you call that?
KERRI: Yes. I mean, of course, the joke being that I belong to a group called the Iron Butt Association, which is dedicated to promoting the safe and sane practice of long-distance endurance motorcycle riding. So the only requirement to join, besides having the defective gene that makes you want to sit on a motorcycle for hours and hours on end, is to be able to ride a 1,000 miles on a motorcycle in 24 hours, which once you do it once, you very quickly decide if you ever want to do it again and if you do decide you want to do it again, you are one of the ingroup.
AARON: What's a reference point for a 1,000 miles? That's a number that I only know conceptually.
KERRI: Let's see. It is a 1,000 miles almost exactly from Seattle to Anaheim to the front door of Disneyland. It's a 1,100 miles from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida.
CORALINE: Oh, wow.
KERRI: It's 2,000 miles from my house in Seattle to Chicago.
JAMEY: What made you feel like you wanted to sit on a motorcycle for that long?
KERRI: I don't really have a short answer for that, but I'll give you an honest answer. I mean the short answer is the jokey one to say, “Oh, I've got a defective gene. Ha, ha, ha.”
But when I was in – I grew up in the country and had a lot of a lot of struggles as a teenager and the way that I escaped from that was to go get in my car and drive around the back roads of New England. Dirt roads, finding old farmsteads and farm fields and abandoned logging roads and that gave me this real sort of sense of freedom.
When I moved out to Pacific Northwest—no real friends, no family out here—I spent a lot of time in my car exploring Pacific Northwest. I had a lot of those same vibes of being by myself and listening to my good music and just driving around late nights.
When I got into to motorcycling, I rediscovered that joy of being by myself, exploring things, seeing new things, and if I wasn't seeing something new, I was seeing how had changed this week, or since last month, or since last few years since I've been through a particular region. And my motorcycling is basically an extension of that, it's this sort of urge to travel. A desire to be by myself under my own control, my own power, and to learn and discover new stories that I'm not learning just by sitting in my apartment all day.
I work from home. I've worked remotely for 8, or 9 years now, so anytime I get to leave the apartment is a joy and adventure, but doing so for longest ended periods of time just lets me see more of the world, expand my own story, and learn the story of others as I travel.
Being a single solo lady on a motorcycle, I'm instantly the object of interest wherever I stop and it doesn't help that I have rainbow stickers and all sorts of stuff all over my bikes. My
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