Dan Sea took nothing but what would fit on his rented motorcycle to explore the Northwest last September.

His goal: ”to do something wild and crazy.” His platform: a motorcycle tour provided by a rental business in Bend.

Sea, 50, said he was surfing the Web for ideas when he came across Road Trip, a Bend-based company that rents motorcycles and offers mapped and guided tours across the western United States.

He said all expenses for the month cost him about $7,000, and he traveled from his home in Georgia to begin the trip from a city he didn’t know existed.

”I’d never heard of Bend before,” Sea said. ”But my idea became just take a motorcycle trip and see where it takes me.”

Such free spirits have become the backbone of a business in Bend started by a young man with a dream.

Not many people outside of the Northwest have heard of Bend, said Scott Sargent, 34, owner of the company. The city’s relative anonymity scared Sargent when he moved to Bend in 1996 with the purpose of opening a company with a European customer base.

Road Trip began as a gamble, Sargent said. He used his savings to buy 16 motorcycles and move to Bend from Los Angeles because he liked the mountains and he thought the Redmond Airport would offer a convenient service for international visitors.

Sargent, who was born in England and has lived in several places including East Africa, Australia, Dubai and Israel, said he lost money the first year, broke even for a couple years, and is beginning to profit because his company has began serving more local residents.

His business jumped when he opened a Web site two years ago. Before that, he said he attracted just enough business to cover his expenses because his only advertisement at that time was in European motorcycle magazines.

”I didn’t realize there would be a U.S. market,” Sargent said. ”This has been a real eye-opener for me. I thought, why would someone from here want to pay to tour their country.”

Sargent said more than half of his business comes from within the U.S. and many of those customers come from Oregon.

Road Trip offers customers mapped routes and hotel destinations for six possible multi-day trips, with such tours as the Pacific Coast, Southwest, the Rockies, the Canadian West and the ”Best of the West.”

Customers can also rent motorcycles for any number of days or weeks to travel to self-directed destinations. Prices run about $80 to $120 per day, depending on the motorcycle.

The Southwest route draws the most people, Sargent said, because it features the Cascade Lakes Highway, Crater Lake National Park, Death Valley National Park, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Salt Lake City.

Another customer was Stephen Kehoe, 32, of Washington D.C., who flew to Bend and mapped his own route.

Kehoe and his girlfriend, Katherine Cannon, rode a Honda Shadow motorcycle 2,000 miles through Oregon, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho in one week. Kehoe said they visited Yellowstone Park, the Idaho Panhandle and ghost towns in the Old West.

”Once you sail off into the hills, it is wonderful and romantic and you can just go wherever,” Kehoe said.

In the end, it was the people he met along the way who made the trip, Kehoe said.

”When you’re out on the bike, you’re all part of the same community,” Kehoe said. ”If I met someone on the streets in Washington with straggly hair and dressed like a biker, I might avoid them, but on the road, they are the nicest people.

”We met two guys on the road who had been traveling for five weeks and we rode with them for two days.”

But not everyone who uses Road Trip travels across the country.

Michael Sapronetti of Bend said he rented a motorcycle this month to enroll in a local training course. He said he found Road Trip to be in high demand with limited supply. Sapronetti said he wanted to rent a Harley Davidson, but they were booked for several months.

Sargent said he plans to buy eight new motorcycles this summer, representing models in Honda, BMW and Harley Davidson. The motorcycles will be added to his 16 existing ones, which are available for customers from May to October.

Sargent said the bikes are tools to give people a chance to escape the ”hourly life” and taste the Western roads.

”The average working man sells his life by the hour,” said Sargent as he pulled out his well-worn pocketbook copy of ”Walden,” an essay written by Henry David Thoreau while he lived alone in the woods.

”I can’t work an hourly job,” Sargent said. ”You only live life once.”

While living in L.A., Sargent spent the 1980s and ’90s working odd jobs and traveling the world on his motorcycle.

He made most of his money buying 1950s and 60s Japanese motorcycles and selling them at higher prices to collectors in Japan.

”It was mad,” Sargent said. ”I was in every state. I was everywhere.”

One evening, while in a restaurant, he said an older man noticed his California license plate and asked if he rode his motorcycle the entire distance from the state.

”He said he always wanted to do that,” Sargent said. ”I heard that from so many people that I thought ‘this is crazy. There has to be a career in this.’”

Sargent said he prefers to have a career where he can tell stories about sleeping with bears, riding through dark blusterous nights, meeting seedy characters in unfamiliar territory and riding hundreds of miles to help a tourist with a broken-down bike. He said he continues his work because he loves it.

”When you drive in a car, you look at the scenery through a glass window like you’re watching television,” Sargent said.

”But when you’re riding a motorcycle, you are a part of the scenery.”