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CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE I magine some million-and-a-quarter miles by mo- torcycle! If you want to know what it's like, talk to Piet Boonstra, a former enduro racing cham- pion turned long-distance adventure tourer. Piet (a Friesland spelling, pronounced "Pete") spent a lifetime riding and seems to have enjoyed just about every minute of it, save for the ride in 2013 where some jerk intentionally cut him off causing the 87-year-old rider to crash and end up in the hospital in a coma. Piet came out of it and lived to tell the tale, but his riding days were over. For- tunately, he'd ridden the equivalent of at least 10 lifetimes aboard a motorcycle and took the time to document it by book and website. Piet's efforts resulted in him earning winning numerous off-road races and the New England Enduro Grand Championship in 1966. Later in life he won the AMA's Joe Christian Award for "outstanding freelance writing" after his story, en- titled, "Passage to Labrador" appeared in the AMA's magazine in 1997. Later he was named the AMA's Outstanding Road Rider in 2002. Piet Boonstra was born in 1925 in Buchanan, New York, in the same house where he lives today. He and his wife Lillian eloped on a motorcycle in 1948, and they enjoyed motorcycling together for better than five decades, until Lillian passed away in 1999. While in college at the Detroit Institute of Technol- ogy a friend who had a 1946 Harley asked Piet if he'd like to try it. "We went to a little park up in Dearborn," Piet remembers, "and I took a ride up one way, got turned around and came back the other way. It was less than a month later I quit school went back home to New York and bought a Harley." Little did he know at the time, but that first ride in Dearborn logged the first of over a million miles of riding for Piet. For the first few years Piet was riding strictly on the road, but then he thought he'd try to run an enduro. Riding a big street-going Harley in the woods seems crazy today, but big Harley and Indian V-Twins were the main machinery used in the early era of off-road competition. For as much success as Piet would have in endu- ros, his first attempt didn't go that well. "I ended up in the Yorktown swamp," he laughs. "That was only 30 miles out from the start and my race ended right there because it took four guys to drag that big 74 overhead out." But Piet persisted and came back the next year and had a much better run, finishing 15th out of 80 or so riders in his class. "Then I was hooked," Piet said. Piet then bought a Harley-Davidson Hummer. It must have been a sight to see the six-foot, five-inch Piet riding the diminutive little 125cc Harley two- stroke through the woods. He said the Hummer offered one distinct advantage—he could actually pick the bike up, a big plus in off-road racing. It was a turning point for Piet. In one of his first enduros on the Hummer, he finished second overall to local champ Don Pink. "He was the best rider in this area at the time," Piet says of Pink. "He came in with a (score of) 902 and I came in with a 907." For a time Piet raced a Harley Model 165 tuned From the Woods to the World P108 Piet Boonstra's storied life of riding, racing and adventure touring took him over a million miles.