After I arrived in Birmingham, I didn’t really know what to expect — much like Dothan. It was a truly new place rather than revisiting memories from a journey walked before. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t bode well for my time there — it was going to be raining most of the trip — not uncommon for the South, but not necessarily something I’d made peace with. I was hoping to do some writing, but I didn’t have the energy to go out in the rain.

My buddy D had mentioned the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum, which definitely piqued some curiosity, but I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. His partner laughed and said, “You’re definitely better off going with him than me — I’ve already seen it, and I’m just not that into motorcycles.” Somehow that comment leveled without really communicating what was inside that building. I remember D sending me a picture of my old V-Strom in the museum years ago, texting “you need to come here.” That thread went stale — until today.

I walked into the museum and my jaw hit the floor. Not because of one bike. Because of all of them.

The Guinness Book of World Records calls it the world’s largest motorcycle museum, and walking those six floors you believe it immediately. It’s seeing the forest rather than a couple of really great trees. You go from the bike you saw on television as a kid, to the one ridden by your crush ten years ago, to the one your parents told you you could never ride while you were under their roof, to the one you hope to ride next. It was a mind f*** in all the right ways, and that’s what tightens the pilgrimage aspect. As I’ve explained this place to others, I simply say it’s like understanding why Muslims go to Mecca. It is that spiritual, that moving, that broadening.

There was the CHP bike that Ponch rode in CHiPs. A Yamaha Super Ténéré and a ST4 that went around the world. The Yamaha VMax that the guys at Kickstart Moto Club back in Savannah are always going on about. A line of Buells that my riding buddy has been insufferable about ever since he picked up his Ulysses. The Ducati Hypermotard — the one I lusted after for a good fifteen years from a safe distance. Vintage dirt bikes and track bikes that men your father’s and grandfather’s age rode at speeds well beyond sane, building the motorcycle racing culture we have today. An entire Daytona exhibit, race bikes leaned into a banked curve frozen in time. Harley-Davidson represented well beyond the leather cruiser culture it is today — early board track racers so stripped down and raw they barely looked like motorcycles at all.

Then there was the Whitelock Tinker Toy. A motorcycle with 48 cylinders — sixteen Kawasaki KH250 engines arranged into six banks of eight, holding its own Guinness World Record as the functional vehicle with the most cylinders of any motor vehicle on earth. It needs a separate 50cc engine just to start it. I stood in front of it for a while.

The whole place was lit right — every bike spotlit, every shadow intentional, the building feeling more like a gallery than a warehouse. As a photographer, I noticed it immediately. A friend has been pushing me toward flash photography, and walking those floors I understood exactly what he meant. Blue Moon Cycle out of Atlanta had a BMW on display, which landed a little differently knowing they’d recently stopped carrying the brand.

There’s also the architecture itself. The elevator shaft runs the full height of the building with bikes displayed on shelves alongside it, floor after floor — you ride up past an Aprilia, a Honda CBR, a vintage Ducati, decades of machines stacked against the concrete. Somewhere at the base, a Formula 1 car sits on the ground floor below it all, looking up.

On the top floor I found the R1250 GS — essentially the bike in my garage back home. I stood there for a moment and did the math. I’m vintage.

Then I found the V-Strom. Right there in the elevator tower, bright yellow, sitting on a shelf like it had always been there. D had photographed it on his first visit and texted me “you need to come here.” I first saw that bike at the International Motorcycle Show in 2003, right after I low-sided my Kawasaki Vulcan and was genuinely lost in terms of where, when, and how I wanted to be part of the riding community. That V-Strom gave me an answer. I rode it a hundred thousand miles. Finding it here grounded something I hadn’t expected to need grounding — my place in this. A hundred thousand miles is real. You can’t fake it. I took my photo.

Then there was the Easy Rider chopper. Stars and stripes tank, ape hangers, helmet resting on the back. I know that film. I grew up with that film and the idea of freedom it was selling — a freedom that, back then, didn’t quite have room for someone like me. Standing in front of it now, on the other side of my own road, something quietly resolved. These men and women rode into history one way or another, and to some extent, so have I. It’s like walking in the redwoods amongst giants — and slowly realizing you belong there too.

We went out back in the rain and took in the integrated track that wraps right into the museum property. A racing school was running practice in the wet — not an all-out session, more of a careful run across damp pavement — but they were out there doing it, on not one but two overpasses that cross above the track. We watched a machine I can only describe as a truck and vacuum combined, running slow laps to suck puddles off the racing surface and keep it safe enough to ride. On the way out I grabbed a Mr. Pibb Zero from the gift shop. You can’t get those back home. Small thing. Felt right.

A hundred thousand miles on that V-Strom. I used to call it the wood-paneled station wagon — not a looker by any stretch — but it looked after me across every one of those miles, through a lot of years and a lot of road. Somewhere along the way it ended up here, behind glass in Birmingham, Alabama, in the world’s largest motorcycle collection. I took my photo. D was right. It was time to come.

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