Dealer obsession

What began as a baseball pilgrimage across America turned into a full-blown Harley-Davidson obsession, taking Richard ‘Sod’ Mason and his wife Karen to 42 states and more than 200 dealerships around the world

The first time Richard walked into a Harley-Davidson^® dealership, he didn’t even own a Harley^®. He was in Tennessee, standing beside the Jack Daniel’s distillery, when he spotted the storefront and wandered in.

“I bought my first T-shirt before actually owning a bike,” he laughs.

It was 2017, and he and Karen were in the thick of another quest entirely – ticking off every Major League Baseball stadium in the United States – and they completed all 30. But on that same trip, someone in Milwaukee insisted he visit the Harley-Davidson Museum. He walked in as a former sportsbike rider who had given bikes away for more than a decade. And he walked out being bitten by the H-D^® bug “well and truly”. And since the baseball quest was finished, the dealer hunt naturally became the new map to follow.

The next year he bought a Harley-Davidson Breakout^®. It didn’t take long to realise it wasn’t the ideal machine for long-haul touring, and by 2019 he was riding a CVO^™ Street Glide^®. This year he upgraded again, picking up a 2025 CVO Road Glide^®, and he’s put more than 10,000 kilometres on it in less than six months.

“We rode across to Western Australia, up to Coober Pedy and then back home to Melbourne just for something to do,” he says. “It took nine days.”

But the real adventure is the dealer odyssey that began in Tennessee and has since grown into one of the most impressive personal dealer logs we’ve seen. The couple has visited 207 dealerships across Australia, the US and Southeast Asia since that first experience back in 2017, and Richard reckons he’s ridden to around 150 of them.

“In the last trip to the United States in 2023, we knocked over 90 dealerships,” he says. His goal had been to search out and visit 120 Harley dealers in 120 days.

“But after 90, I was going, you know what? I can’t do it.”

In the US, he rides thanks to a mate in Virginia who keeps two of his 10 bikes registered and ready for him to borrow whenever they visit. To keep track of it all, he and Karen use an app called Locate Harley Dealers, which he attributes to the success of what’s now become quite the obsession. As a project manager by day, he loves the structure it provides, and he exports it all into spreadsheets.

“We live by the spreadsheet,” he says. “These are the dealerships we’re going to do. These are the maps. And off we go.”

Collecting is part of the ritual too. Poker chips, pins, stickers and – at least for a while – t-shirts. The pins alone weighed 12 kilograms on the last trip. “The TSA had to open the bags and take everything out because it’s all metal,” he says, referring to the US agency responsible for airport security screening. “I didn’t want to put it all in my suitcase in case the suitcase went missing.”

And with each dealership comes a different flavour of Harley culture. In the United States, Richard and Karen were bowled over by the hospitality. A Texan dealer offered him a beer at 9am. American Eagle Harley-Davidson fired up a giant mechanical eagle hanging from the ceiling with lights, smoke, the lot – an act normally reserved exclusively for new H-D owners. A dealership in Scottsdale donates all its profits to wounded veterans. In Amarillo, the H.O.G.^™ chapter room was “as big as some restaurants,” complete with kitchen, stage and LED lighting running around the walls.

Japan was a different experience. Staff stayed at their desks. Nobody approached them or invaded their space. Vietnam was the opposite again. During a heat-soaked visit at “38 degrees but feels like 48,” one dealer ordered and paid for their taxi when their phone coverage failed. “He just said, ‘don’t worry, here,’ and did it on his phone.”

And then there are the quirks – like Colorado’s Blue Laws, which prevent dealers from discussing motorcycles or anything pertaining to them on Sundays. “I went in and started asking about the bikes,” Richard says. “He goes, ‘Sorry mate, you’ll have to come back tomorrow. Can’t talk about anything.’ I wondered why he was even open.”

Through all of it, Karen is always along for the ride, enjoying the travel, the collecting and the camaraderie just as much as her husband. She’s been asked countless times whether she’ll get her own bike, but she genuinely prefers experiencing it on the same bike.

After 32 years of marriage, the two of them have found a late-in-life hobby that fits them perfectly. They ride with comms and talk the whole way, share the same scenery at the same moment, laugh at the same roadside oddities and take in every ride as a team.

“We have more fun being together on the bike than most people, I think,” Richard says.

H.O.G. is woven through their story. Richard spent years in Yarra Valley H.O.G. as photographer, safety officer, assistant director and director, and while he’s since stepped back from those roles, he’s still a member of both the Yarra Valley and Dandenong chapters.

He and Karen have visited 42 states so far. People often ask why they haven’t done the other eight. Richard just laughs. “Because they don’t play baseball there!”

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