Absurdity
French Woman Crossed Three Continents On A Motorcycle Smaller Than Current Roomba
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
In 1973, a 29-year-old French journalist named Anne-France Dautheville got on a Kawasaki 125cc motorcycle in Paris and rode it around the world. She completed more than 20,000 miles across three continents, which means she crossed deserts, mountain ranges and multiple sovereign nations on an engine roughly the size of the one inside a decent leafblower.
The 125cc engine produces, depending on who you ask, somewhere between 10 and 13 horsepower. A modern Roomba has approximately 1 horsepower, so Dautheville had the Roomba beat. She also had it beat in terms of navigation, because there was no GPS in 1973, no Google Maps, no travel influencer pinning the good stops. There was a paper map, a motorcycle the approximate size of a riding lawn toy, and whatever was on the other side of the road when she got there.
Boing Boing published the story this week, which means the internet is approximately 52 years behind on the filing.
Dautheville had been riding motorcycles since the late 1960s, a fact that, in the context of 1960s France, required a level of social confidence most people reserve for being correct in an argument they are actually losing. She was born in Paris in 1944 and had, by all available evidence, a much higher tolerance for the phrase "are you sure about this" than the average person.
Elon Musk, who has spent the last several years explaining that modern civilization is held together by his personal tolerance for risk, was three years old when Dautheville left. He could not yet ride a bicycle. She was already in month two of a solo circumnavigation on a machine with the structural weight of a large dog.
The trip covered Europe, Asia and North America, crossing countries whose borders involved varying combinations of paperwork, suspicion, language barriers and roads that used the term "road" as loosely as a tech company uses the term "team."
At no point did a safety panel convene to assess the feasibility. No stakeholder meeting was scheduled. No risk matrix was produced and distributed to relevant parties for comment. She just went. This is, depending on your relationship with institutional process, either an inspiration or a paperwork nightmare that somehow sorted itself out.
There is no record of a 13-horsepower engine being considered sufficient for international travel before or since. The Kawasaki 125 was not designed for this. Most things designed for specific purposes are not then used to circumnavigate the planet, which is arguably the point.
Dautheville arrived back having completed the first known solo world motorcycle journey by a woman, and also having completed it on a bike most people would currently describe as a starter motorcycle for a nervous teenager in a parking lot.
She later wrote about the trip and continued traveling. The 125cc Kawasaki has not been heard from since, though it almost certainly outlasted several larger, more confident machines that never left town.
The story we are making fun of: https://boingboing.net/2026/09/19/anne-france-dautheville-motorcycle.html