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.AppleTv+The guys made two more road-trip series, Long Way Down (2007), which took them through Africa, and Long Way Up (2020), which featured Harley-Davidson Livewire electric motorcycles and Rivian pickups as camera crew vehicles. If you look at the dates, it’s clear Boorman and McGregor were overdue for another ride, and indeed, they’ve been on the road again. Airing now on Apple TV+, Long Way Home, sees the pair exploring countries around Europe, this time on vintage bikes. We’ve seen the first two episodes, and while the series has become more polished and the hosts more practiced in the past two decades, we still found their friendship appealing and the idea of hitting the highway irresistible. Long Way Home feels a little more travel- and food-focused than Long Way Round, which showcased more difficult terrain, but the challenges of keeping the classic bikes running add a new twist to the format. We managed a few minutes with McGregor and Boorman, and while we didn’t have enough time to ask all our planned questions about favorite foods and the vintage VW pickup seen in the first episode, we did get some tips on how to hit the road the long way. AppleTv+1974 Moto Guzzi El Dorado.C/D: Tell me about the bikes you chose for this trip. Ewan, you’re on a ’74 Moto Guzzi, and Charley, you went with a BMW 750?EM: Yes, it’s a 1974 Moto Guzzi El Dorado, Californian police bike. It’s quite a niche bike. I’ve always ridden those bikes and I got this one from a friend of mine. It’s called the Shitstorm, because it was thrown together very quickly over a weekend. I always thought it was called the Shitstorm because it just looks like it came out of a river. And Charley, you had . . . CB: My bike is just here. [We were on Zoom, and his motorcycle was visible in the background.] That’s 1973 BMW R75/5. It was a sports tourer at the time, and it was quite a racy bike. And this tank is a touring tank. Both our bikes did about just over 200 miles range, which was pretty amazing really. I didn’t have a mid-’70s bike when we decided to do the trip. I wanted to get something which was sort of similar age to Ewan’s, and I was looking at Ducatis. Eventually I came across this one and it was in a sad state when I got hold of it, so I had to quickly do a lot of stuff to get it ready. AppleTv+1973 BMW R75/5.I saw that episode where it came in and you seemed a little bit surprised at the state of it. Was that part of the fun, to fix it up, or were you genuinely taken aback when it arrived?CB: Well, it was really a little bit of a surprise. With old bikes like that, you always have to do something. But when I saw the photos it looked a bit different. But she turned out beautiful. And I do love just being in the garage. AppleTv+Besides the added prep of buying and fixing the bikes, did using classic motorcycles change the way you guys rode or filmed?EM: Yeah, yeah. There’s something nostalgic about riding an old bike. It’s sort of perfect for what we do, to ride along at 60, 65 mph. It’s a comfortable speed to be able to capture all the stuff we need to capture. In our first trip, sometimes we had huge distances to cover where nothing much changed around us. In Russia or in Kazakhstan, vast distances. And then you were happy to be able to sit at 80 mph.But for this trip, because we were doing it around Europe where new countries are coming at us every couple of days, there were so many different things to see and people to meet. It was really nice. Did you have any major breakdowns?EM: Charley’s bike never let him down. I think there was one time it didn’t start on a ferry and gave him a fright. Mine had one issue: the leads from the coil to the spark plugs were knackered, and it took me a long time to figure it out. It sort of was the point, to go on old bikes because it’s a challenge, but also it’s just fun. You know they’re gonna break down and you’re gonna meet people that can help you fix them. AppleTv+Were people enthusiastic to help out because of the sweet vintage bikes? EM: I don’t know that we’d ever have thought to do these trips if it hadn’t been from our old mate Ted Simon’s book Jupiter’s Travels that he wrote in the ’70s. That book starts with him sitting under a tree in India somewhere where he’s run out of petrol. And he’s sitting under the tree, safe in the knowledge that someone will come and help. And of course that is the case. Some guy turns up on a bicycle and he sits on the back of the bicycle and they cycle off to get petrol. And that’s exactly what happened with us when my bike sort of stopped working completely in Estonia.CB: I think motorcycles, any motorcycles, because you’re already in the environment that everybody’s in, they tend to talk to you a little bit more. I think people kind of see you dusty and tired and they want to help out. AppleTv+Long Way Round and Long Way Up are a bit more rugged than Long Way Home. Is that because of the bikes in this series being older? Because of you guys being older?CB: When we were doing Long Way Up, we spent a fair bit of time with these electric bikes on very rough roads. When we were in Bolivia, there were corrugated dirt roads and we were hammering away and it was difficult. We started talking then about how lovely it would be to be in Scandinavia on nice paved roads. So when we dreamt up this one, it was much more about exploring close to home. I don’t think it’s because we necessarily wanted to have an easier ride, because we were on old bikes, which are a challenge anyway. It was a shorter trip, but more packed with meeting people. Related StoriesYou guys covered a lot of regional events and foods. Did you have those planned? How did you know what was going on in the places you were going to be?EM: We do have fixers. We employ people from each country and tell them roughly where we’d like to go, and they flag things to see. Some of the sports that we came across, the Ski-Doos and pole vaulting over the canals, those were happening at specific times and we planned for those, but some, like the German shooting club, we just came across that. We wanted to get the most out of each country for us, and as a result, we get the most out of it for the show.AppleTv+[At this point the PR rep was on the third reminder that we were out of time.]Ok, last question! Road-trip tips?CB: Pick the start date and don’t change it. Regardless of whatever goes wrong with the planning, really try to stick to that date and head out. EM: You can plan and you should plan. And then once you start, you’ve got to give in to the journey, because the journey is not gonna adhere to your planning. So you’ve gotta allow yourself the freedom of letting that happen. If you’re not gonna get there on the planned day, then don’t get there and get there the next day. Give yourself the freedom to experience.CB: Also, baby wipes. EM: A very popular answer, Charley. It’s very important.The first episodes of Long Way Home premiered on Apple TV+ on May 9, 2025. New episodes of the 10-episode docuseries will debut weekly through the July 4 finale.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.
 
Source: caranddriver.com