Ride More Talk Less

If you spend enough time around motorcycles, you’ll notice something.

A lot of people love talking about riding more than they actually love riding.

They’ll spend hours debating handlebars, pipes, suspension setups, GPS routes, riding groups, matching gear, and what roads they might ride someday. Meanwhile the bike is sitting in the garage hooked to a battery tender like it’s in long term storage waiting for retirement paperwork.

My wife and I ride two-up on a 2020 Harley-Davidson Road Glide Special, and most Saturdays are pretty simple for us. We usually don’t have some massive cross-country master plan. Sometimes we pick a lunch spot. Sometimes we just point the bike in a direction and go see where the day takes us.

This ride was one of those days.

Early summer of 2025 in North Dakota. Still cool in the mornings and honestly cool enough during the day that you could actually enjoy riding gear without feeling like you were being baked alive at every stoplight. Perfect riding weather.

We rolled out of Williston and headed north on Highway 85 toward Zahl before cutting east on Highway 5. From there we worked our way across northwest North Dakota through towns like Crosby before eventually making our way to Mohall for a fuel stop and snacks.

That was the destination.

A gas station.

And somehow those always end up being some of the best rides.

No reservations. No schedule. No pressure to hurry somewhere. Just miles of open North Dakota roads with nothing but small towns, farmland, and horizon in every direction.

Honestly, I think North Dakota gets overlooked by a lot of riders because people assume there’s nothing here except oilfields and interstate highways. Most people flying over this state probably look out the airplane window and think it all looks the same.

They’re wrong.

The backroads of northwest North Dakota have their own personality if you slow down enough to actually see it. Small towns that still feel like small towns. Long empty stretches of pavement where you can settle into the ride without traffic stacked on top of you every mile. Old grain elevators standing above the prairie. Patches of rolling farmland mixed with open sky that seems to stretch forever.

There’s something peaceful about riding out here that’s hard to explain unless you’ve done it.

You’re not fighting crowds.
You’re not sitting in vacation traffic.
You’re not trying to impress anyone.

You’re just riding.

That’s what I love most about these kinds of Saturdays with my wife. We’re not chasing some famous motorcycle destination. We’re not trying to create the perfect social media post. We’re just spending the day together on the bike seeing parts of North Dakota most people never bother to explore.

By the time we reached Mohall, we fueled up the bike, grabbed snacks, stretched our legs for a few minutes, and then decided we’d head home a completely different direction just because we could.

No real reason needed.

That’s the beauty of riding.

Sometimes the best motorcycle trips are the ones without an agenda. The ones where the ride itself is the point. No checklist. No timeline. No pressure to make every mile some life-changing spiritual event that belongs in a documentary narrated by a guy with a deep voice and a leather vest.

Just ride the damn motorcycle.

About 160 miles one way for a gas station stop might sound pointless to some people. To us, it was a full day of cool air, quiet roads, small towns, and another reminder that North Dakota has a lot more to offer riders than people give it credit for.

So if you’ve been sitting around talking about riding more than actually riding, here’s your sign.

Fuel the bike up.
Pick a direction.
Take the backroads.
See the small towns.
Quit overthinking it.

Ride more. Talk less.