Just a quick followup with some comments on Sun Chaser's post about the morphology of the term Adventure Motorcycling. As the post is locked it's not possible to reply there.

Having met and 'toured' with Ken Craven a few times back in the 70's I can imagine the response anyone would have got from him if you'd suggested that we weren't 'tourers' but 'adventure riders'. He really was a no bullish*t sort of bloke and when I wrote a magazine article about a trip I went on with him in 1978 I described it as a bit like going on holiday with your school headmaster. By that time of course Ken had been travelling and organising trips for about 30yrs and had made both his name and his panniers for the 'Partitours' he ran in the 1950's. I don't recall anyone, either in person or in print in any of the magazines I avidly bought in the 60's and 70's, calling travel by motorcycle anything other than touring. We shortened it to 'bike trips' but the term 'adventure motorcycling / biking' would have been laughed out of usage as being pretentious in the extreme.

It may of course be - as was suggested - that it's the usual two cultures separated by the same language at the root of it, but the idea of seeking new experiences on a motorcycle wouldn't have been regarded as that unusual even in Ken's world. It's just that he (and our small bike travel circle as well) would have kept adventure in its noun form. To use it as a verb - that we were 'adventuring' - would have been to give what we were doing delusions of grandure. In fact for me, still, the word adventure is something more appropriate for things that the under 10's do, something, for example, from the pages of an Enid Blyton book about The Famous Five. As an adult I'd be expected to put away childish things including the concept of 'adventure'. I might still experience it but by then it would have grown up into 'touring' or 'travel'. Simply my opinion of course and one formed by the culture and the times I was brought up in, but 'adventure' seems to be an idea taken from those early travellers and sold back to us by marketing companies.

Having bought Ken's 1970's touring book - the one pictured in front of the hovercraft - back in the day it's interesting to contrast it with one on the shelf in front of me at the moment - Robert Wicks's Building the Ultimate Adventure Motorcycle. The world of motorcycle travel, and particularly the 'gadgets' available to help with the process, may have moved on in 40+ yrs but the core idea is much the same. As it was back in the mid 1950's when Ian Mercer wrote his book - Europe on Wheels - about travel by scooter. If the word adventure is used in that book I can't find it.