Motorcycle Explorer August 2014 Issue 1 | Page 32

Feature: build a community - grant johns Grant Johnson is the man behind Horizons Unlimited, with his wife Susan they have travelled the globe and it has been their driving passion to help others achieve their overland dreams too. MEM - Tell us a little about yourself and why you started Horizons Unlimited. Grant I'd been riding a long time in Canada and in the USA as well. Within a year and a half of starting riding at 16 I was racing, motocross and then road racing, a couple of national championships, then rode two day qualifiers for the six days. I qualified for the Canadian team, but we had no money to go! Always an adrenalin junkie I also raced sailboats and taught skiing. But then what do you do? I'd ridden everywhere within reasonable reach of home, so as Susan phrases it, I "hatched the crackpot scheme of travelling around the world on a motorcycle." We eventually spent 11 years travelling around the world very slowly, from 1987 to 1998, eventually reaching over 50 countries, and every continent including Antarctica. In December 1997, while in Ushuaia, Argentina, waiting for the boat to take them to Antarctica, CompuServe told us that we could have a website (We'd been sending email s via CompuServe since we left in 1987) so we posted the story of our travels on the then new internet. The story quickly attracted people from all over the world, and by the time we got home a few months later, there were hundreds of emails coming in requesting information about where we had been and how to do it! We started the HUBB forum so that people could answer each other’s questions, and the newsletter to keep in touch with where the travellers were, and within two years the site was a global phenomenon, reaching travel- minded people in over 150 countries. It wasn’t planned, it just