“Easy Rider,” starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, inspired three young men to take a road trip from Greenville to the West Coast. Childhood buddies Ray Bourgault and Ray “Momo” Desrosiers, both from Greenville, joined a high school friend from Mason, Dave “Morry” Morrison, on the journey.

In July 1973, two weeks after Momo’s high school graduation, the three set out on their own ride. After the trip, the trio separated. It was Morrison’s idea to reassemble the group in September to commemorate the adventure. Morrison invited the author (a neighbor in Mason) along to document the conversation, as they reminisced over lunch in Hillsborough.

Momo (whose nickname came from the French pronunciation of Raymond) and Ray were grade school classmates at parochial school in Greenville. They met Dave when they all attended Mascenic Regional High School in New Ipswich in the late 1960s. They bonded through playing on a club tackle football team, competing against squads from towns as far away as Nashua, and they went undefeated over a couple years.

At Christmas 1972, the idea for the trip crystallized, after Dave and Ray gifted Momo an oversized, brown suede, ornately-fringed jacket, a la Dennis Hopper. Momo embraced Hopper’s character in “Easy Rider,” which he had viewed multiple times at the cinema down in Fitchburg, Mass.

Ray reminded Momo, “The real beginning [of the trip] was when you got your jacket.”

Momo admitted, “I thought Dennis Hopper was the cat’s meow...I was shocked. I said, ‘Wow’ [to the gift], because that wasn’t a cheap jacket then, and even now.”

Dave listened to Ray and Momo while perusing Ray’s original photos, laid out on the lunch table and observed a bit wistfully, “We all had longer hair, then.”

The period was at the end of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Ray had a low draft number, but mandatory conscription ended in early 1973. Momo was too young for the draft and Dave had filed as a conscientious objector.

In June 1973, Momo was finishing high school (he was two years junior to the other two), and working at night as well to raise money for the trip. Ray and Dave already had full-time jobs at Pioneer Plastics. The three bought motorcycles from Nault’s in Manchester – identical Honda CB450s for $835 each, Momo recalled.

Dave quipped, “That’s pretty amazing you can remember that [sum].”

How did they settle on those motorcycles?

“Probably what we could afford,” admitted Dave.

“I was just going to say that!” Ray affirmed.

Ray continued, laughing, “We brought in cash...and the salesman was mad, because he didn’t want to count it all!”

Momo, who unlike his companions had never driven a motorcycle, had two weeks to become comfortable on the bike before his licensing test. He recalled, “I putzed around town, and stalled it many times… .”

They left in late June or early July. There was a sendoff at Ray’s parents’ house – the primary hangout for local kids – on Temple Street in Greenville.

Momo remembered, “It was a big day...[My parents] were a little nervous.”

The young men felt like pioneers. None had ventured beyond the East Coast.

Ray elaborated: “Greenville was our world. This was huge for us. The funny part of this is, from our area, no one had ever tried this; no one got out of town.”

The destination of the ride was Momo’s brother’s place in Sacramento, Calif. Ray also had a relative in the area.

Each biker had a sleeping bag, tent and metal-framed hiking backpack’s strapped on the rear. Several hundred dollars worth of traveler’s checks were tucked into a small, metal toolbox under each motorcycle’s seat.

Momo said, “We were loaded down.”

Dave agreed, “We decked them all out.”

So decked out, in fact, that Ray described Dave pulling up at any early break, and as soon as he stopped, his bike toppled over due to the uneven storage of supplies on one side.

Other than planned stops at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, the Mount Rushmore region in South Dakota and former Mason resident Randy Rose’s place in Idaho, the route unfolded one day at a time.

Ray admitted, “We didn’t have a plan,” although they did bring an atlas.

They’d log up to 250 miles most days. Life on the road was without frills, decidedly less romantic – and usually less dramatic – than the film.

Momo reported, “On those bikes, 250 miles a day was a lot.”

“Some days we did 500 miles, and it was too much,” Dave recalled.

Ray added, “Every 50 miles we’d stop.”

Momo continued: “[The Honda CB450] wasn’t the bike to go cross country on. You’re pitched forward, The seats were terrible.”

Dave countered, “But, it worked.”

They headed west from Greenville along mostly secondary roads into New York then Pennsylvania. On one of the first nights in the Pine Creek Gorge (also known as the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania), they were visited by a savvy raccoon.

Ray described the moment: “We had bought some bologna and a loaf of bread. That was what we were going to eat that night. And Momo decided, ‘Maybe I’ll feed the raccoon a little bit of bread.’ The raccoon ran by the one slice and grabbed the whole bag out of his hand.”

Dave continued: “The next morning, [racoons] had gotten into our bikes, climbed up on our bikes and cleaned out our packs. Everything was everywhere.”

Ray chuckled. “Of course, we blamed Momo.”

They might have been more prepared for the elements, all admitted.

“We did ride a lot in the rain,” said Ray.

“We didn’t buy motorcycle rain suits,” Momo continues. “We had ponchos.”

And they would get soaked.

“Those were useless,” Momo scoffed.

“A truck went by Morrison,” Ray began while suppressing a laugh, “and his poncho blew up over his head, and he went off the road!”

“I survived, I guess,” Dave deadpanned.

They stayed in some formal campgrounds, and occasionally in a lodging, but often wherever they could find some open space just off the road.

“We were pretty frugal,” Momo recalled.

‘We didn’t splurge,” agreed Dave.

What had been their experience with this mode of existence?

“We used to play ‘Army,’” in Greenville, explained Ray, and they had spent nights outdoors in the area.

Did they travel with any weapons for protection?

“Not back then,” Ray recalled. “We didn’t think about it.”

After the Hall of Fame, they headed on to Chicago. One memorable meal was at a restaurant where the three were the only white patrons. “Brazier” on the sign was mistaken for brassiere by one of the travelers, who shall remain anonymous.

They left Chicago, and headed through Kansas and Nebraska on their way to South Dakota. On that segment of the trip, “It was boring,” they agreed.

“Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska: corn fields. That’s all you saw,” said Momo.

“Cornfields...” Ray continued. “You’re driving all day, and pretty soon your head’s going like [he feigns nodding off]. I did drive off [the road] a little bit; some corn cob hit me in the head, a few times.”

They all chortled.

Once they were out West, they all bought snake bite kits in little yellow plastic containers.

“It was all set up: a tourniquet, a scalpel, antivenom. I still have mine,” said Momo.

They saw Mount Rushmore and the nearby Crazy Horse memorial, then Glacier National Park in Montana.

“To get out of New England and see the country was amazing,” said Momo, as the other two nodded.

Most of the people they encountered along the way were friendly. At campgrounds, they were even offered food.

To keep in touch with folks back home, they sent postcards and called once a week.

While travel proceeded fairly smoothly, there were a few fraught episodes along the way. Somewhere in the Midwest, Dave wiped out on a muddy road under construction, but was not seriously injured.

Dave reminisced about the time he had arrived in a town in the Midwest ahead of the other two, and took off his helmet to reveal his long hair.

“Someone across the street said, ‘Well now, ain’t she pretty,’ and he starts walking across the street,” he said. “He gets about halfway across the street, and then [Ray and Momo] pulled up beside me. He turned around and went the other way.”

Momo recalled a near-miss in Colorado. He had fallen a bit behind Ray and Dave.

“I’m doing 70, and I come around the corner, and here are these two freakin’ jokers dead stopped in the middle of the freakin’ road. I slammed the brakes on and went right between them. I had a few choice words.”

During an oil change in the Badlands desert, Ray lost his oil plug. “By that time tools were flying. I remember taking a fit.”

“Oh, there were a few fits,” Momo chimed in. “It was a long, hard trip.”

Momo recalled driving at night out West, and seeing lights way in the distance.

“I said, ‘Let’s reach those lights,’ but we could not get there.”

“It was like ‘The Twilight Zone,’” Ray added, impressed by the scale of the terrain. “We weren’t anywhere near anything.” They woke up to find they were camped under power lines. That was one of a few nights when they went to bed hungry, recalled Momo.

In Idaho, they met up with Randy Rose, who had lived in Mason for a couple years and been a member of the football team. They stayed at Randy’s for a couple days, then Momo and Ray continued on as a duo, heading northwest to Seattle. Dave and Randy spent a few more days working on Randy’s chopper, then they proceeded west on their way to San Franciso, where Randy had to bail out due to a series of mechanical issues with his bike.

Momo said, “The only thing I remember [about the Pacific Northwest] is it was foggy and cold.”

At a rest stop in Oregon, there was another moment of suspense. Ray laughed as he related what happened: “All of a sudden all these bikes pull in, and they turned around and it said [on their back] ’Hell’s Angels Frisco’. I said to Momo, ‘We gotta get out of here!’”

“And here we are on our little Hondas,” Momo mused.

The tension broke as soon as one Angel approached, eyed their motorcycles and asked, incredulously: “You (expletive) guys drove those all the way from New Hampshire?”

Momo and Ray guffawed recalling this moment.

“They all laughed, and he gave us a map to a party.”

The two forewent that event.

Ray continued, “But you know what? On our whole trip – because they probably came to Laconia – they were some of the only people who knew where New Hampshire was.”

Momo and Ray slept in motels along the way, but they made it down Route 1. About three days later, they reunited with Dave in Sacramento. Dave had gone on his own down to Disneyland, then returned. He recalled reaching 97 mph at one point.

The trio couldn’t agree on whether the trip to Sacramento took two or three weeks.

“Some of this we’re making up as we go along,” Dave confessed.

The three stayed in Sacramento at Momo’s brother’s apartment. Ray slept in a bean bag chair, because space was limited.

They didn’t plan to motorcycle home.

“We were pretty beat,” admitted Ray.

They were plotting the return trip, when Momo’s brother expressed interest in buying a motorcycle. Ultimately, Momo’s brother offered his 1967 Ford Fairlane in trade for Momo’s bike. They rented a U-Haul trailer for the two remaining motorcyles. The three left Sacramento at noon, and they took shifts driving the Fairlane. The only real drama on the return trip was one early morning when a cement truck heading toward them veered off the road and rolled over.

“It was traumatic,” Dave recalled.

But Ray added, “Other people stopped, but it was like ‘We’re on a mission; we gotta go!’” and they motored on.

“We’d had enough of the trip, and we’d had enough of each other,” said Momo, wryly.

Ray agreed, recalling an earlier detour through a western desert that was ill-advised.

“Who’s idea was that?” he asked rhetorically, directing his gaze to Momo. “We ran out of water, and we wanted to kill you.”

Dave dissented, “It was an adventure, right? You gotta experience the desert.”

Foreshadowing the brutal ending of “Easy Rider,” Peter Fonda’s character lamented on his final evening, “We blew it.” In contrast, Momo, Ray, and Dave agreed that had it not been for viewing the film, they would probably not have taken their epic ride. While the Mason/Greenville boys’ trip may have been a mostly G-rated version of the movie, their expedition provided an indelible memory nonetheless.

When they arrived in Greenville precisely 69 hours after leaving Sacramento, the noon church bell was chiming, but there was no formal celebration of their return, and the trio separated. Their odyssey was noticed, however, by a local bike enthusiast, Butch Lafleur, who would later encourage other young people to venture out on their motorcycles.

Ray and Momo formed a local motorcyle club, Phoenix (based on a Grand Funk Railroad album cover), and led excursions around the Northeast for a few years. Momo rode by himself to San Diego and back eight years ago, and again three years ago. He’s planning at least two more cross country rides, “in my 70s and my 80s.” Momo, Ray, and Dave kept in touch individually for 51 years, until this reunion.

Was their trip worth the effort?

The three, in unison, issued a hearty, “Yes!”

Ray concluded: “We went out to places no one ever heard of.”

Don Perlo is working on a biography of Mason legend Bronson Potter.