Texas Motorcycle Tour

Texas is big, and this route treats it that way. Eight days out of Dallas, seven nights and around 1,580 miles through West Texas and into New Mexico, with long days and a landscape that empties out fast once the city is behind.

Wichita Falls and Abilene fill the first two rides out of the city, then Paducah and Childress lead on to Amarillo, and from there the route reaches Palo Duro Canyon, the second-largest canyon in the United States and almost unknown outside the state. Santa Fe follows at 290 miles, swapping the Texas panhandle for New Mexican adobe and a noticeable change in altitude.

The southern leg is the strange one. Roswell comes first, a town that has built an entire identity on an incident in 1947, then Carlsbad Caverns National Park, where a lift drops visitors more than 700 feet into a cave system of extraordinary scale. San Angelo and Lamesa follow on the long run back east, then Abilene again and Dallas.

EAGLERIDER supplies the bike and books all seven nights, with Harley-Davidson touring models alongside Triumph and BMW sport machines. Fuel, meals and insurance are arranged separately. The riding days are consistently long, 225 to 290 miles, which is the nature of this country rather than a flaw in the planning. For riders who like distance, open road and very little traffic, West Texas delivers all three in quantity, and Palo Duro Canyon and the Carlsbad Caverns are genuine surprises for anyone who thought the panhandle was only farmland.