OverlandSphere
Overland Travel, Expedition & Adventure Information for 4x4, motorcycle and truck overlanders
Trip Start: Trip End: .
ACCESSORY TIME. THE WARN XT17Portable Motorcycle Winch. One company back in the United States who have been a tremendous help to me since I contacted them last October is WARN. Andy Lilienthal, WARN Industries Online Marketing Manager has really taken care of me when it comes to aftermarket service of WARN’s products.When I lived back in the U.S. I already had two…
AURORA BOREALIS The Northern Lights Click here for my recommended musical accompaniment to these images. It only took me three and a half months to finally get up close and personal with my very own display of the oft elusive but absolutely stunning and trippy aurora borealis, or northern lights. People come from all over the world just to catch…
No, no, the OTHER left…. Biggest Bull Moose I have ever seen. Enormous. Must of been AT LEAST 1200lbs minimum as it walked right out in front of me. Just stood there, snorted, steam rising from it’s massive flared nostrils, and stared right at me. I could see him tense up, like he was getting ready for a charge.…
4 Years in…. I parked my bike by this old fishing trawler in Apalatchicola Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. A passerby stopped to chat with me, mentioned he had a similar model of BMW motorcycle and then asked me if I wanted him to take my picture. At the time I didn’t give much thought to the significance…
Dear Santa…. Rovaniemi Finlands most notorious, or in this case, well known resident is of course, Santa Claus. But the real story and meaning of how Santa Claus came to be was only brought to my attention recently by the president of Karu MC, Hekki. He prefaced his email with a warning that came along with the information he enclosed…
WARNING!!. This article contains GRAPHIC IMAGES of a Winter Wonderland from Norway and Finland that could be hazardous to your travel plans. Viewer discretion is advised. LAPPLAND, SUOMI. E8 South of Kautokeino, Norway. * Norway, leaving the best for last. Of course it did, wouldn’t you know it. I got some of the best and most spectacular shots of the…
“I should be there in no time, just follow the squiggly blue line”, I mumbled. Only 730 km, easy. Under normal conditions. In any season other than Winter it would be. And without hundreds of twists, turns and mountain passes. Oh, and without riding on an Ice Hockey rink all the way down to Alta. AND without being a photographer…
“It’s All Downhill From Here”. The first time I ever heard the name Nordkapp being mentioned, the very sound of it conjured up images of aShackleton-esque like expedition, scraggy men with beards, in big thick puffy Arctic subzero (sounds better than cold weather) anoraks with fur lined hoods, icicles hanging off the ends of their mustaches, sounds of a dog…
MAGERØYA, NORWAY. The road to Nordkapp, Norway . Dude!!. Where’s my sidecar?. Top of the World. The northernmost part of Europe. Right?. The road to Nordkapp, Norway . Well hold on, not so fast. That’s not technically correct since Nordkapp is on an Island, the island of MAGERØYA in Norway. It’s not part of mainland Europe, but for this…
I really didn’t plan it this way you know, timing it so as I ended up at Nordkapp right on New Years Eve like this. But my arrival here at this juncture in my trip does seem kind of fitting for me, since Nordkapp is as far North as a person can travel in Europe in or on a…
Long nights and even longer days. Life in northern Scandinavia, right above the Arctic Circle. But yet I find myself quite content here in this extremely cold, dark but hauntingly beautiful enviornment, I really am enjoying it more than I thought I would. I was going to ride down to Rovaniemi Finland last Thursday to go and pay a visit…
“STILL IN STROMSUND” My first night in Stromsund was spent in a shower. Well, not all night in the shower, but it was my first hot shower in 4 or 5 days, so I relished every last hot water droplet that came out of that shower head and probably stayed under the water for a full hour. I loved every…
“GETTING SPIKED in STROMSUND” E45, north of Hammerdal, Sweden, Nov 2012. After my 2 days in an emotional dungeon in Hammerdal and feeling a little bit unnerved, I hit the road on the third morning, determined to push on in a northerly direction.I’m starting to find that these moments, these states of mind that I’m having that seem to be steering…
RECAP. Margareta and Ludde. My first nights camping after leaving TABY, just north of Stockholm, was in LJUSDAL, about a 350 km ride. Not much progress for a days riding but I had a late start from Taby. I tried to leave by 8 am but between one thing and another it was nearly 1pm before I was finally motoring…
I really enjoyed Stockholm a lot, the architecture, the way the city is laid out, the myriad of winding little alleys and streets in Gamla Stan or “Old Town” Stockholm, and of course my visit to the Ice Bar Stockholm in the post before this one here on the blog.Gamla Stan is a “Must See” for visitors to Stockholm, it…
ICEBAR, Stockholm Sweden. While I was Sidelined in Stockholm I made use of the downtime and went in to see the ICEBAR which is located in the Nordic Sea Hotel at Vasaplan 4, right beside Stockholm Central Station in the heart of Stockholm City Centre. I went there one afternoon just to take a few pictures of the bar,…
Wednesday, Oct 24th, 2012. Vallentuna, Sweden. Kind of ironic that after visiting the VASA Museum and 16th century warship, I find myself temporarily grounded in the city that the Vasa went down in. I mean, I had intended to be up in Nordkapp by now. There are worse places to run aground I guess, I’ve made some good friends here…
The old Tuborg Brewery in Hellerup, just north of Copenhagen Denmark. Before I got to Sweden and up to Vejbystrand I had a small amount of time in Denmark. Stopping only for a picture and not the full brewery tour at the Tuborg offices, my destination for that day was Helsingor. If you keep riding north from Denmarks capitol…
Ride Away Cancer. Murph, Daniil Novikov and his Mum at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen Denmark. Daniil is there to receive a bone marrow transplant to combat his Leukemia. I went to Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen on a whim, well, not really a whim but I wanted to go to a children’s hospital as I was riding up to Vejbystrand Sweden where my…
It was January 2011, I was 2 years sober on the 17th and was in Colorado talking on the phone with my friend Mandy Miller who was instrumental in getting me into rehab 2 years earlier so I could get clean and sober. I was nearly a year on the road at the time and was chatting with her…
The end product of 3 months of work. Hello and welcome to the final installment of my BMW Duo-Drive Sidecar Conversion. You can read Pt I of the build here, Pt II of the build here, Pt III of the build here, and Pt IV of the build here. Looking through all the pictures I shot and revisiting…
Carina and Jana at Suzuki Motorcycles would………girls, over here please…. …..thank you.Carina and Jana at Suzuki Motorcycles would like to welcome you all to this episode of Wherethehellismurph.com, coming to you from the Nurburgring in Nurburg, Germany. Germany’s Nurburgring first opened on June 18th, 1927 as The Nurburg-Ring, 14 miles of the most challenging racetrack in the world. …
I am very pleased to be able to announce that Wunderlich Germany is now the official sponsor of Wherethehellismurph’s 3 Wheels, 7 Years and 7 Continents Round the World Expedition. Frank Hoffmann, Murph and Erich Wunderlich, in front of the Wunderlich Head Office in Sinzig, Germany. A few days before the EGT I decided that as added insurance it would…
A rare Cees Fick Vincent. After I took part in the 11th Annual Diomage Sidecar Rally Toon van Houtert stopped by LBS Sidecars the following week for a coffee and a chat, I was interested in how the Diomage Sidecar Run got started with the MC de Kleppenjagers 11 years ago. So in the course of conversation he asked me…
My Stern Rox sidecar frame ready to go to the powdercoaters. The spare tire carrier and assorted metal pieces from the sidecar ready for powder coating. Friday, August 10th, 2012.This morning we disassembled my soon to be sidecar outfit for the last time as we enter into the final stages of the construction.All of the metalwork is finally finished and…
My 2004 BMW R1150 GS Adventure as it looked when it arrived in Holland on May 3rd at LBS Sidecars. Hello and welcome to Pt IV of my BMW Sidecar conversion. You can read Pt 1 of the build here, Pt 2 of the build here, and Pt 3 of the build here. My name is Murph and I am…
“De Rode Fiets”. Gemert, the Netherlands. A little bit of Old World Charm. Having been raised in a small town in Ireland called Bray, 21km(13mls) south of Dublin, population around 24,000 (at that time), and working and traveling in a 65km(40ml) radius of said town, I grew up with tractors sharing the town streets along with cars and delivery bicycles.…
So thank you thank you all.Absolutely fantastic feedback and suggestions from everyone, I am very pleasantly surprised with the amount of detailed comments that everyone left.I really had no idea that there were so many attentive readers of my little travel photo journal out there, so thank you all very much for taking the time to answer my survey request. …
Starting today, Sunday, July 22, and open or running until Midnight on Thursday, July 26th, I would like to try to find out a little more about you, the readers, who come here and log on to my blog, so today I’m kicking off a survey of sorts. I have an average 600 views per day, and depending on the…
The weather here in Holland can change drastically from hour to hour. When I arrived here in Elsendorp in the Netherlands on April 29th, the weather was still a little chilly, in the 40′s at night, up to the 60′s in the daytime. Then as May turned into June the weather got progressively better, temperatures climbing, falsely lulling me into…