Riding in the Time of the Plague

Motorcycle Travels During Covid-19

By: Nick Adams

Narrated by: Nick Adams

During the spring of 2020, the whole world was hiding from the Covid-19 virus. In Ontario, we did not experience the complete lockdowns which were enacted in parts of Europe, where people were required to stay in their homes with quarantines rigorously enforced by the police, so it was still possible to get out riding, as long as one was sensible and took appropriate precautions.

Long distance, multi-day adventures to distant places were out of the question. Provincial and international borders were closed, so riding had to be focused on places closer to home. Riding familiar roads and revisiting familiar places can be inspiring. Sometimes, it's a good thing to look a little deeper into the places we normally race by.

Riding his usual crop of Moto Guzzi motorbikes and new steed from the far east, Nick heads out into the back country of eastern Ontario, finding new roads to travel and a new perspective on the places not far from his own back door.

©2020 Nicholas R. Adams (P)2020 Nicholas R. Adams

Delightful stories and storyteller

I feel a little more positive and a little inspired after hearing his stories. They aren't glorious conquests, just nice, real and well told.

Finding Air When the World Stops Breathing

A lot of travel books came out during COVID. Very few actually feel like traveling. This one does.

What Nick Adams captures here isn’t just riding during lockdown—it’s movement as a form of sanity. For those of us who didn’t handle the claustrophobia of shutdowns particularly well, this book quietly opens the horizon again. Listening to it, you can feel air moving past you. Empty highways, shuttered towns, that eerie stillness—we were all there, and Nick nails it.

The closed businesses—now permanent storefront ghosts—feel like what they really were: someone’s dream, gone. A life’s work, gone. Adams never leans into the sadness, but it’s present enough to matter. More than once, I found myself hoping not just that the businesses survived—but that the people behind them did as well.

As with all of Nick’s work, the motorcycle becomes a thinking machine. The rhythm of travel matches the rhythm of thought—counting days instead of dates, recalibrating risk, deciding what “out there” even means during a pandemic. Riding is already a calculated gamble; COVID adds an invisible layer, and Adams navigates that tension with honesty and restraint.

What really carries the book, though, is the human connection: brief, careful, and sharp. Small kindnesses. Half-encounters. A shared understanding that people still want to see one another—even when they’re trying not to.

And then there’s the narration. Nick, reading his own work, is always the winning element. Calm, precise, never overstated—he knows exactly where to let the words breathe. It turns a good book into a genuinely immersive listening experience.

This isn’t a loud or heroic book. It’s thoughtful, humane, and quietly generous—and it’s less about the bug than it is about what Nick understands instinctively: riding toward the world with curiosity, kindness, and a steady, but loose hand on the bars.