Joe and Sharon Thibodeau celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last summer with a motorcycle trip along Canada’s Atlantic coast.

Joe and Sharon Thibodeau celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary last summer with a motorcycle trip along Canada’s Atlantic coast.

“This is where it begins for me right on this road.”

— Johnny, in “The Wild One.”

They were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. In July 2008, Joe and Sharon Thibodeau had also both recently turned 60.

And Joe Thibodeau had been retired for 10 years from Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical.

The Lawrence residents had plenty of reasons to plan a long, relaxing vacation.

Sharon’s sister, Mary Burgert, and her husband, Dennis Burgert, who are both former Lawrence residents, were also celebrating their 40th anniversary.

“How about a cruise?” they thought.

When those plans fell through, Joe Thibodeau had his mind on something else. He grew up in Canada before settling in Lawrence.

But he had never visited Canada’s Atlantic coast.

“We stayed close to home,” Joe Thibodeau says. “I’d never been to Nova Scotia or the east side of New Brunswick.”

Plus, he and Sharon, a retired food service worker for Lawrence public schools, had always wanted to take an extended motorcycle trip. The Burgerts were bikers also.

But this 6,000-mile trip was a little different than hauling their motorcycle to the Ozarks for the weekend.

They planned for about one year, poring over maps and checking out information from tourism offices along their route, and Sharon Thibodeau put together dozens of packets and folders for their trip itinerary.

The couple left from Lawrence July 4, and eventually they met the Burgerts in Afton, Va. They picked up the Burgerts, who each had their own bikes, for the trip.

From there, they headed north, stopped a few days in Connecticut to see Joe’s brother, spent time in Maine, then crossed the border into Canada.

The riders took turns navigating the trip, but Joe Thibodeau says he stays away from today’s global-positioning systems or computerized maps. Even in Canada, where he says the road signs “leave a lot to be desired,” he was not afraid to stop an ask for directions, even if he had to tap on a driver’s window and “scare the heck out of them.”

“You kind of get lost, and that’s kind of the fun of it,” he says.

They rode hundreds of miles per day, so the crew was often glad to see a hotel room at night.

“It’s not like being in a car. At the end of the day, you’re pretty tired, but all in all, resting over night, we were OK to move on,” he said.

They were able to see historic sights in New Brunswick and much of Nova Scotia, including riding a ferry to Prince Edward Island.

“The whole thing was stunning and wonderful,” Sharon says.

They returned through Quebec and Montreal before crossing back into the United States and eventually returning to Lawrence on July 29, logging 6,652 miles on their trip.

“It meant a lot to me to go back and be able to go to Nova Scotia and see where the family actually started,” Joe Thibodeau says. “It’s very scenic.”

Such a long trip on a bike has not deterred the Lawrence couple for planning another 2010 trip to the Canadian Rocky Mountains.

“If we didn’t have so much planned for this summer, I’d be gone,” Sharon Thibodeau says. “Hopefully next year we want to plan a big one.”