Hi there. Remember me? I’m Gary, the retired PR guy, golfer, pro bono communications consultant and Harley rider. You may recall my writings and ridings from previous years, as I shared my experiences on the road. Last year, it was a Harley Hillbilly Holiday.

To commemorate last year’s ride and prepare for my next adventure, I’ve posted some photos from the 2011 HHH on today’s blog entry. That’s why some of the pix may look familiar. It’s a good reminder of what I have in store the next three weeks, and it helps me make sure the blog is functioning properly. All the images you see on this blog in the days ahead will be original material, shot on my iPhone, in the Fall of 2012, with the ink barely dry on the photo paper.

I’m posting this blog entry because — with apologies to Willie Nelson — I’m on the road again.

Today, I begin a three-week journey, traversing 13 states and perhaps crossing an international border or two. I’ll visit national parks, Scenic Byways, Civil and Revolutionary War sites, lighthouses, islands, the Atlantic Ocean, river valleys and Lowcountry. I’ll ride ferries, explore historic landmarks, photograph fall colors, stay in cheap motels and eat all kinds of unhealthy food.

It promises to be, without a doubt, just about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. And, for the price of an Internet connection, you can join me. But please — do keep your clothes on.

***

With Sarah’s blessing, I’ve left La Quinta and am heading for Farragut, Tennessee.

Right now, I’m at the Palm Springs, California, airport — en route to Knoxville, Tennessee, the urban center of East Tennessee. Farragut is a nine-iron from Knoxville.

In Knoxville, people do talk a lot like Sarah. They should; that’s where she’s from. Tennesseans twang. They speak slowly. Depending on how deep into Appalachia you are, they can be all but impossible to understand. Sarah will tell you that when she first arrived in Seattle in the 1980s, she had to write down her words — to help listeners figure out what she was saying.

I still recall the first time Sarah and I arrived at the Knoxville Airport in September 1998. It was late at night, and there was a good ol’ boy talking on his cell phone while he mopped floors. Sounded to me like the dude from Gomer Pyle, USMC. Shuh-ZAY-um! Click here for a true Gomer Pyle Shazam moment (two of them, actually). If y’all have a hankerin’ to speak like Gomer and his cousin Goober, click here for a primer on learning a Southern accent.

The stereotype of Tennesseans being inbred, bible-thumping, closed-minded, truck-driving, gun-toting, beer-swizzling, tooth-missing, uncivilized rednecks is simply not true. Sarah drives a Lexus. Just sayin’.

With thanks to Jeff Foxworthy, click here to see 25 ways you might be a redneck (#10: “Your junior prom had a daycare”).

***

Famous folks from Knoxville include:

• Dave Thomas, who founded Wendy’s hamburgers in 1969, naming the restaurant after his daughter Melinda Lou, whose nickname was “Wenda”
• Country music stars Chet Atkins, Roy Acuff and Kenny Chesney. Click here to learn more about Chesney, who we saw perform at the Stagecoach country music festival near our home in La Quinta last year.
• Writer Alex Haley of “Roots” fame, who also conducted the first-ever interview for Playboy magazine (with jazz musician Miles Davis)
• Pat Summit, winningest basketball coach on the planet, who announced in 2011 she’d been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease
• Admiral David Farragut of Civll War fame. Farragut is most remembered for his order at the Battle of Mobile Bay: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

The city of Farragut gets its name from Admiral Farragut. The most famous people in Farragut today: Tina and Ray Sanders. More on them shortly.

Besides its notable residents, Knoxville is best known for two things: The 1982 World’s Fair, also called the Knoxville International Energy Exposition; and the University of Tennessee, famed more for its athletics than academics. To be fair, UT offers professional degrees from more than 300 programs, has medical and law schools, and the UT business school is known widely for its Masters of Bubba Administration (MBA) studies.

First the World’s Fair, which attracted 11 million visitors. Its symbol was the Sunsphere, a 266-foot high steel tower, topped with a five-story gold globe. The Sunsphere, which was featured in a 1996 episode of “The Simpsons,” still stands. The Knoxville World’s Fair debuted several new inventions, including touch-screen displays, boxed milk, and Cherry Coke. Click here to see how the New York Times covered opening day of the Fair 30 years ago. Sarah was still living in Tennessee during the Knoxville World’s Fair, and was one of its frequent visitors. She had a season pass, often going to the Fair for dinner after a long day of work at Boeing’s Oak Ridge facility.

Knoxville’s other claim to fame is the University of Tennessee — which, despite popular opinion and sentiment — Sarah Murr did not attend. Sarah, instead went to Hiwassee College in Madisonville, Tennessee; click here to read about Hiwassee, which is the Koasati and Hichiti Native American word for “copperhead snake.”

The Vols, who play football at 102,455-seat Neyland Stadium (with the legendary orange-and-white checkerboard end zone), are part of the Southeastern Conference, where football is king — at least for the men. The Lady Vols basketball team has won eight NCAA Division I titles, the most in women’s college basketball history. If you love all things Vol, as Sarah does, click here to begin acquiring life’s necessities in Tennessee orange. (The official Tennessee orange is Pantone Matching System number 151.) Gotta love the Vol Mall!

Why the name “Volunteers?” Tennessee is known as the “Volunteer State,” for the large number of Tennesseans who volunteered for duty in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War.

I am volunteering for nothing today. It’s late and, while I’m happy to be in Tennessee, I need to begin thinking about the ride ahead.

***

Tomorrow is a rest day before we hit the road on Friday. We may get in a round of golf at Fox Den Country Club in Farragut, where aspiring PGA Tour players come each year to play the Knoxville News-Sentinel Open — previously on the Nationwide Tour and now on the Buy.Com Tour. The event’s winner last month was Darren Stiles. Click here to see the Fox Den layout.

Fox Den CC is where Sarah’s cousin Tina lives, a short walk from the first tee. Tina is the same age (77) as Sarah’s mom Betty would be if Betty were alive today. Tina is actually Sarah’s first cousin. It’s hard to resist making jokes about everyone in Tennessee being related. Because they are. Tennesseans have a well-deserved sense of humor about it.

You may remember, from my “2011 Harley Hillbilly Holiday” that Tina has a Harley just like mine — a Heritage Softail Classic. Click here to check out the bike. Tina’s Softail is garaged in Farragut, and for some reason, she’s happy to let me ride it all over the country. So I have, in essence, Hogs in the Pacific and the Eastern time zones. Life is good.

Tina has only one speed: turbo. She is wholly incapable of doing anything less than 100 percent. She’s a world-class bridge player, genealogist, and golfer. In the late 1960s, Tina shot a 69 at Fairwood Country Club in the Seattle area, which stood as the course record for about 10 years.

Hyper-competitive on the golf course, with the game to back it up — Tina recently won the Ladies Club Championship at Fox Den Country Club — for a record sixth time. That’s almost as impressive as Sam Snead winning the Greater Greensboro Open eight times. Tina’s been club champion at Fox Den in four consecutive decades, starting in 1982. She’s an outstanding golfer, and a USGA rules official, which makes playing with her an amusing experience.

A golf purist, Tina’s Tennessee license plate on her Cadillac reads RULE 1, which in essence defines the game: “Golf consists of playing a ball with a club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules.” Rule 1 is the rule on which all other rules are based.

Click here to learn more about Rule 1, and the other official rules of golf. When you play golf with Tina, she’s a rule fanatic. No mulligans. No gimme putts. I hate that.

Oh, and Tina’s also a world-class motorcycle lender. That rocks!

***

Tina’s husband, Ray, will be my riding partner the next few weeks, as he has been for the past few years. In 2009 and 2010, we rode from La Quinta to Lake Tahoe and back — through Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks, over high mountain passes and barren deserts. In 2011, we rode the Blue Ridge Parkway and on into Shenandoah National Park (click here for all things Shenandoah), then visited some swanky golf resorts, including The Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia — and The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Click here to find out more about The Homestead, and click here to check out The Greenbrier. We rode through coal country in Kentucky, where Ray grew up — and visited the house where he spent his youth — in the 1930s.

Like me, Ray is not your typical biker. He has no tattoos and no belly. Ray is thoughtful, smart and an inspiration on two wheels. He was the first in his family to get an education beyond high school. Ray earned Bachelor’s and Masters degrees at the University of Kentucky’s Lexington campus — in mining engineering and metallurgical engineering. He’s ridden hundreds of thousands of miles on various motorcycles — Harleys, BMWs, Hondas. It’s hard to imagine a place in this country he hasn’t been, though on this year’s ride, I’ll try to show him some new roads (I did the route planning for our 2012 ride). Ray has ridden through Europe and to the Arctic Circle — but not on the same trip.

Ray makes me feel safe on the road, which I hope is welcome news to Sarah. I am expected to come home to La Quinta in one piece, and celebrate her September 28 birthday some time in October.

Ray and I are a well-matched pair on the road. When you see us heading down the highway, we may remind you of two other famous bikers cruising the USA:

“Get your motor runnin’,

Head out on the highway,

Lookin’ for adventure,

And whatever comes our way.”

Sound like anyone you know? Click here to see a video (suggest you skip the advertisement) that will take you back in time, and capture the essence of a buddy road trip. Compared to this video clip, we are hoping for a happier ending, less camping, shorter haircuts and better food.

***

Last year, you may have received news of my daily travels, via my “Flitter” feed. As you may recall, Flitter is a proprietary hybrid app I developed, blending the best of Flickr (photos) and Twitter (text). What you received from me were Flits (ie, “a Flit from the Twit”). It was a brilliant technical innovation, but a business failure. My IPO was as dismal as Facebook’s.

So this year, I am ditching Flitter and moving up the technology value stream. I will be posting to my new web-based blog (“Ride With Gary“) every day for the next few weeks. Each evening, after we park the bikes for the night, you should receive a short e-mail notification with a highlight or two of the day’s ride, and a reminder to “click here” to visit my blog.

What you are reading now is the first entry on the blog. Here are a few things you might like to know about how the blog works:

• It is interactive. You can comment on individual photos, or on the entry itself (the text). Feel free to tell me how beautiful the scenery is, how dry my writing has become, or how stupid the mud puddle photo is. You can click on any photo to enlarge it, or view them as a slide show.
• Size matters! Unlike Twitter’s 140-character limit, this blog has no restrictions on what I can write. TravelPod seems to have unleashed my inner verbosity. This, apparently, is what happens when a PR guy retires and has seemingly unlimited time to get cozy with his iPhone keyboard.
• I Love my iPhone … but this blog is best viewed either with a tablet (iPad) or a desktop computer. Yes, I posted what you’re reading with an iPhone, and you can view “Ride With Gary” on an iPhone, or an inferior Android-powered device. But your blog-reading experience will be far more enjoyable using something bigger than a smartphone. As mentioned above, size does matter. D’oh! By the way, the new iPhone 5 goes on sale Friday, the first day of our ride. While you’re standing in line at the Apple store, waiting to buy the next big thing, I’ll be riding a decidedly low-tech Harley with a generation-old iPhone 4S in my back pocket.
• There will be many “click here” links in each day’s blog. For example, you can “click here” to view a menu where we ate; you can “click here” to view the complete route of a day’s ride (courtesy of Google Maps); you can “click here” to learn more about a place we visited; or “click here” to view a video — one I shot, or ripped off from someone else’s great work. For example, click here to view the Day One route from our 2011 Harley Hillbilly Holiday.
• All the entries will be archived. If you miss a day or two (how could that happen?), you can easily catch up on previous posts.
• Pay attention … you might learn something. At the end of the ride — sometime in October — you should be a better Jeopardy contestant than you are today. I plan to dump a lot of information in your inbox, some of it useful, much of it trivial, nearly all of it verifiable. If you learn something during the course of my ride — you’re welcome.

There’s something in it for you! Yes, you can win a prize. You are welcome to participate in “Guess Gary’s Globetrotting” … a simple contest where the winner gets a special souvenir from my travels. Consider it “travel bling.” To enter, simply send me an e-mail (glesser@dc.rr.com) with the subject line: “Guess Gary’s Globetrotting.” In the e-mail, estimate the total number of miles I will ride from Farragut, Tennessee, and back between now and — well, whenever the ride ends. (Hint: the correct answer is somewhere between 100 miles and 10,000 miles). Entries will be accepted until September 30 at midnight EDT. The winner will be announced when we park the bikes for good in Farragut at the end of the ride, and the prize will be awarded shortly afterward. If there’s a tie, the earliest entry will determine the winner. Your winnings will be tax-free! Like life itself, there is no prize for second place.

I look forward to having you along for the ride over the next few weeks — and I welcome your feedback on this blog.

Unless, of course, you tell me it sucks.