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“I feel like I’ve won the motorcycle lottery”

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Vista motorcyclist to cross Madagascar
Benjamin Myers, 38, is one of just six people worldwide chosen for one-in-a-lifetime off-road adventure
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By Pam Kragen | 3:59 p.m. March 9, 2016
B8867044Z.1_20160309175913_000GD1DS7R1.3Vista resident Benjamin Myers will head to Madagascar in April for a two-week, all-expense paid motorcycle adventure hosted by a German motorbike equipment company. Don Boomer

VISTABenjamin Myers is a resident of Vista, but on April 7, he’ll become a citizen of the world as a hand-picked member of the United People of Adventure.

Myers, 38, is one of just six people worldwide — one from each inhabited continent — chosen to take part in a 10-day, 1,000-mile motorcycle trek across the African island of Madagascar. The all-expense-paid trip is sponsored by Touratech, a German company that makes and sells accessories for adventure motorcycles, and led by the company’s globe-cycling founder, Edward Schwartz, and his wife, Ramona.

The Schwartzes have warned the six finalists this will be no pleasure cruise. The off-road adventure is likely to include riding, pushing and pulling their 500-pound-plus motorcycles through mud, rain, difficult river crossings, mountain climbs and lots and lots of dirt. And Myers couldn’t be more thrilled.

Since he first sat as a toddler on his father’s dirt bike, Myers has had a love affair with motorcycles and the open road.

“When I ride, I feel like a modern-day cowboy,” said Myers, who commutes to work in Carmel Valley each day on a BMW 900 adventure motorcycle. “There’s that sense of the wind in your face, the adrenaline and the pavement rushing by. When I’m on a bike it gives me an incredible sense of joy, even more when I’m out exploring new places.”

Madagascar is on the wish list of most veteran world travelers. Located off the coast of Zimbabwe, it’s the world’s fourth-largest island with 226,000 square miles of land and 17 million inhabitants. It’s known for its variety of climates and topography, from rainforests to deserts, and for its diversity of wildlife (including lemurs, civets, fossas and aye-ayes) that can’t be found anywhere else on earth.

Myers will be traveling with the Schwartzes, a documentary film crew and the other five winners of the United People of Adventure contest. They include men and women, ages 25 to 42, from Egypt, India, Australia, Iceland and Brazil.

The winners went through a grueling selection process last month in Germany that included three days of interviews, psychological and cycling tests, and multiple team-building exercises. Two semifinalists were invited from each continent (Myers’ competitor was a man from Quebec) and the winners, chosen by the Schwartzes, were announced Feb. 27.

Besides seeking good motorcyclists, the couple wanted riders with diverse viewpoints, an adventurous spirit and unique qualities they could bring to the team. Myers has only been adventure-cycling for a few years but his skills with cooking, languages and artful trip documentation were likely key factors in his selection.

Myers grew up in Spain, the oldest of four children born to a pair of traveling missionaries. The family moved to Seattle when he was in his teens, where he attended high school and started college.

But after taking a backpacking trip with a friend to Mexico at 21, Myers decided there was more to learn by traveling the world than sitting in a classroom. So he quit college to hit the road and ended up in Germany, where he learned the language and spent the next three years. At 24, he came back to the U.S. and settled in Orange County where he put his artistic skills to work, first by designing auto show exhibits and then as the art director at ZCity Tv, a startup television network. That’s where he met his wife, Marlise Kast-Myers, who was working as a script writer.

After the recession hit, the network went belly up in 2008. Both lost their jobs, but Kast-Myers landed a contract to edit and update several travel books for Fodor’s. For much of the next year, they traveled throughout Central America as well as to Sardinia and Corsica.

Needing an outlet for his artistic energies, Myers decided that instead of taking photos and videos of their travels, he would instead make ink sketches and collages of the places they visited in a series of Moleskin journals.

“I remember as a kid watching ‘Indiana Jones’ movies and he always had these cool leather-bound notebooks filled with sketches and I thought they were so cool. I always dreamed of having my own someday,” he said.

During the next six years of international travels with his wife, Myers filled six journals with elaborate ink, colored pencil and ephemera-filled artworks depicting street scenes, trees, flowers, people and other sights that caught his eyes.

When they weren’t traveling, the couple enjoyed restoring their 1950s-era home near Vista’s Brengle Terrace Park. She has continued to write and edit travel books, and since 2013 he has worked as a visual designer for Intuit’s TurboTax software division. He’s also at work on his second acoustic folk album and he and Kast-Myers sponsor four children in Tanzania.

While the couple share many interests, motorcycling is more his passion than hers. He got his first dirt bike in Spain when he was 12 years old and over the years worked his way up to bigger bikes, even picking a motorcycle over a car during his years in rainy Seattle. Three years ago he bought his first adventure bike, which is a heavy-duty cycle with storage that’s designed for long-range trips, both on and off road.

Last fall, while competing at the BMW GS Trophy adventure riding challenge in Santa Clarita, he heard about the Touratech contest. With some script-writing help from his wife and footage from a videographer friend, he made a three-minuteaudition video — featuring close-ups of his journals — and submitted it two days before the deadline last December.

He was surprised to be chosen as a semifinalist and over the moon to make the final group. During the selection process in Germany, Myers impressed his fellow contestants with his pizza-making skills, something that will come in handy when they camp in Madagascar’s wilderness. He also presented the Schwartzes with a mock journal filled with several illustrations of Madagascar scenery and wildlife and he promised to create a real journal during the trip if he was chosen.

Each semifinalist received $4,000 in Touratech gear, and in Madagascar the winners will each ride a different brand of adventure bike. Myers will ride the Ducati Multistrada 1200 Enduro, a bike that’s not even on the market yet.

Besides making many new friends around the world, Myers said he expects the trip will be the adventure of a lifetime.

“I feel like I’ve won the motorcycle lottery,” he said.

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com

© Copyright 2016 The San Diego Union-Tribune. All rights reserved

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Congratulations! That sounds awesome. I am sure you will have a blast. When will you be going?

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Congratulations! That sounds awesome. I am sure you will have a blast.

It's not me... just copied and pasted from UT San Diego. Is Benjamin Myers a member here?

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Holy Cr@p :exclamation: That is awesome! :smile_anim: We'll have to ask him to an SDAR meeting after he returns to give a presentation on his adventure! :good:

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Wow! If he's not an SDAR member, he needs to be!

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