Welcome to the home page of the GlobeRiders World Tour 2006 Live!Journal. The World Tour, granddaddy of all our adventures, is in its fourth iteration this year. As in previous World Tours, we'll spend 65 days and log over 16,000 kilometers making our way across China, Inner Mongolia, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, The Czech Republic, and Slovakia, to our final destination, Munich, Germany.

Unlike previous World Tours, we begin in Beijing instead of Shanghai, to avoid the massive road construction (and resulting vehicular chaos) underway in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics. The days saved riding from Shanghai to Beijing will be spent to make our first-ever visits to the cities of Chengde, Shanghaiguan, Shenyang and Changchun.

For the first time, our main container of motorcycles, shipped from Seattle, Washington, USA, arrives in the seemingly endless port city of Tianjin.  Further complicating logistics, four of our riders shipped in a separate container from Kobe, Japan, and arrived by ferry. The last-minute delivery of Helge's brand-new BMW R1200GS Adventure required air-shipment from Seattle directly to Beijing. The late enrollment of another rider resulted in air shipment of his bike from Holland.

This year's group is our most international ever, with riders carrying the passports of Canada, Holland, Japan, Norway and the United States.  A "rogue's gallery" of visa application photographs from this year's participants can be seen to the left. The motorcycles are a mix of BMW GS singles, oilheads and hexheads, one rigged with a sidecar, with a lone Kawasaki filling out our complement of 19 bikes. Breaking it down, we have:

As we ride into Germany, a special treat. A happy convergence of schedules has resulted in our crossing our final border for the start of the 6th International BMW Motorrad Biker Meeting, from 07 ~ 09 July, 2006, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  Last year, over 30,000 BMW owners and their bikes came from all over the world for the Biker Meeting, the largest BMW motorcycle rally on the planet. We look forward to adding our 21 members to this year's event - maybe we'll see you there!

The navigation menu below will take you to each of the Live!Journal Weekly Chapters as they are published. A colored link will take you to a published page.  Those that are white are still unpublished (as they're still in the future!)


Come ride with us!

Mike M. Paull - Guide/Webmeister



World Tour 2006 Links on BMW Websites World-Wide

Click here to read a news article about the World Tour 2006 on The World of BMW UK website.

Click here to read about the World Tour 2006 on the BMW Motorrad USA website.