EASYriders - Albuquerque Journal

REST AREA: Steve Roe, left, and James Morrison Take a break at the Sandhill Crane Bed & Breakfast in Corrales, which advertises in their online motorcycle travel-zine.

Story by Carrie Seidman
Photographs by
Mark Holm
Albuquerque Journal

Think motorcycle.

Are you thinking Marlon Brando in tight white T-shirt with cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve and a sneer on his face? Are you thinking of a hell-bent-for-leather gang blasting through town at a thousand decibels?
Think again.
"That old Hell’s Angel image of someone roaring through a town, raping and pillaging, is not who’s on the road today," says Steve Roe, co-publisher of a new Internet motorcycle travel magazine based in Albuquerque.

"Today’s motorcycle travelers are the baby boomers. They/re the ones with the money and the time to go."

Roe and his partner, James Morrison, are betting that these "upscale" bikers are also plugged into the Web, looking for information on places to tour, stay and take care of their bikes.

Crossing borders.

That’s the idea behind their site, Southwest Bike Travel-Zine (www.swbike.com), which went online

last January. Since then, more than 25,000 readers from 59 countries - , but many interested four-wheel travelers as well - have checked out the stories, interactive maps and travel routes on the site. It’s the only place on the Web aimed at touring motorcyclists.

Currently, the electronic magazine has 250 pages of information, with five to ten new pages added each month. In keeping with the publishers’ desire to reach an international audience, some of the articles are available in German, French and Spanish as well as English. It’s not uncommon for Europeans to ship their bike over here to tour,: says Morrison. "I know of four Germans who shipped their Harleys to Chicago, rode Route 66, and then shipped them home from California.

Each touring tale on the sites linked to detailed maps of the areas discussed, as well as available restaurants, accommodations and cycling services in the area. The magazine is cross linked with other locations that offer services for booking trips, making room reservations or communicating with other biking travelers and offers a chat room and free classified advertising as well.

If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, says Morrison, you can plug in a key word and call up information on your desired subject-which need not necessarily be about motorcycles or traveling. If you search "green chile cheeseburgers," for example, you’ll get three articles suggesting restaurants, two maps to give you travel routes and a chat room with readers suggestions.

Both Roe and Morrison are motorcycle aficionados-Roe got his first bike at age 14 and Morrison at 19-but that wasn’t the only connection that propelled the Web site.

"Actually, this all came together in a bar in a pool," says Morrison, referring to a trip he and Roe took by motorcycle to Mexico.

The pair got to talking about how they could combine their expertises-Roe was the former publisher of a hard copy magazine called Southwest Bike and sales manager of a cycle shop in Albuquerque; Morrison had been in the computer industry for 25 years, most recently helping new companies develop Web sites.

There were already motorcycles sites on the Web, as well as online travel magazines, but no one had yet capitalized on the growing international "touring motorcyclists" market.

So that was the audience they decided to aim for. It was a wise choice, according to Frank Del Monte, president of Western States Motorcycle Tours in Phoenix. His clients average 40 years of age and are professionals or highly skilled workers-most riding bikes that cost $15,000 or more.

"These riders have reached the point in life where their children have grown up and flown the nest," says Del Monte. "(They) are folks with theirs careers set, their lives stable and who have discretionary income to spend They want to go and do all the things they couldn’t do when they were tied down with career, hearth, home and family responsibilities."

That market also makes the Web site appealing to advertisers, which have included motorcycle service shops, bed and breakfasts and restaurants among other tourist related businesses. (Advertising, of course, is the online magazine’s income source, since visiting the site is free.) Rather than running pages strictly devoted to ads as in a hard copy magazine, names of advertisers and businesses are interwoven into the stories in what Roe and Morrison call a "non-intrusive" way (though with typical irreverent humor, the two also occasionally follow an advertiser’s name with the words "Blatant plug").

Carol Hogan and Phil Thorpe, owners of the Sandhill Crane Bed & Breakfast in Corrales, decided to advertise on Southwest Bike after learning form a national survey that 30 percent of bed and breakfast bookings have been coming from Internet exposure. Hogan says the decision was an easy one because advertising costs on the Net are "a steal" compared with costs in regular magazines. Annual charges to advertisers range from $100 to $1000, and there is no additional charge for Web space or for help in designing a home page, which the publishers also supply.

The fact that Roe and Morrison are aiming at an international audience was also appealing to Hogan and Thorpe because their own foreign travels have been curtailed by a lack of accessibility for Thorpe’s motorized wheelchair.

"If we weren’t going to travel, we needed to be exposed to people who do," says Hogan. "The net exposes us to a lot of upscale people who are very colorful. We want that."

But travelers close to home also find the information on the site useful. Bob Avila of Albuquerque, who cruises aboard a classic 1989 Heritage Softail Harley Davidson, says the suggested tours - which currently include destinations in Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and the Baja peninsula of Mexico, in addition to New Mexico - will be a boon to all bike riders.

"It will be a great help because they can pinpoint all the best sops, all the amenities you need," says Avila. "And being experienced riders themselves, they can also help steer you clear of the pitfalls of long trip.