Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman Hit the Road on Vintage Motorcycles in 'Long Way Home'
Good buddies going on a road-trip adventure is such a regular television offering that it can be hard to remember that there was a time when a reality-TV travel show was rare new ground. Sure, there was On the Road with Charles Kuralt, and Huell Howser's California's Gold, but for the most part, the actual journey in those shows was edited out. It was the destination that got the air time.
Then, in 2004, actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman showed viewers that the way one traveled could be as entertaining as where one ended up.
In Long Way Round, McGregor and Boorman rode BMW motorcycles across 12 countries, from England through Asia to end in America. The footage seems quaint now, some of it fuzzy and low-res by today's standards, but it brought the idea of dual sport and adventure bikes to a more mainstream audience. It feels sort of silly to say LWR popularized road trips, when stories of on-the-road adventures go back to Homer's Odyssey, but McGregor and Boorman's obvious enjoyment of their time on the road inspired viewers to take their own trips—and certainly led to many more reality travel shows.
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1974 Moto Guzzi El Dorado.
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1973 BMW R75/5.
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Elana Scherr
Senior Editor, Features
Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn't know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver's license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story "A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2." In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story "In Washington, D.C.'s Secret Carpool Cabal, It's a Daily Slug Fest" was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
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