The Plucky Bullet

Berk was feeling pretty frisky about the Bullet. We had cleaned up a corroded spark plug cap and the big 500cc single was running well.

“You stay on the 650, I like this Bullet and want to try it now that it’s running right.” It took no arm twisting to get me back in the Royal Enfield 650 twin’s seat. I feel supremely comfortable on that bike and you will too if your spine has also recently collapsed from lifting 36,000 pounds of concrete last month. The thing suits my wee, 5-foot 6-inch frame perfectly. Bigger guys may fit the 650 also but I have no way of knowing that sort of shin surgery.

Meanwhile, Berk was was like Lawrence of Suburbia burbling along Baja’s Highway 1 with his Eton tie fluttering in the Bullet’s considerable draft. The guy was having way too much fun racing rag-winged biplanes and organizing Gurkhas. The big 500 single was in top form, pulling steadily and hitting every beat right on time. It got to the point that I thought I was missing out on something good. Like Tom Sawyer painting that picket fence.

And then the battery died. Flat dead, like nowheresville, man.

I recently bought a bunch of those lithium engine starter batteries, the ones about the size of a pack of cigarettes that will jump start an aircraft carrier. I whipped the thing out and Berk was impressed at how the Bullet jumped. Wait…that doesn’t sound right…

Anyway, once running the Bullet stayed running and we made it to Guerrero Negro where we located a slightly-used-but-still-holding-a-charge battery. The poles on the used battery were reversed and the case was a little bigger than the stock battery so we had to do a bit of ham-fisted metal rearranging to get the battery to fit inside the Bullet’s box. It’s not pretty but the bike starts fine now. The stock battery side cover won’t fit over the larger battery and we debated tossing it into the weeds but decided Royal Enfield wouldn’t find it so funny. We buried that part in our luggage.

With wires dangling and the larger battery hanging out the left side of the frame our Bullet is looking more like a BMW adventure bike everyday. If we wrapped 75 feet of 3/4 inch electrical conduit around the Bullet you’d swear it was a GS1200. Despite the troubles the thing is growing on us. Really, none of the faults are due to Royal Enfield assemblies.

In fact, each time we get the Bullet back on the road I like the thing better. It’s plucky, it’s a never-say-die-motorcycle in a British stiff upper lip, we keep our side of Gibraltar’s door knob polished, way. You know what I mean?

That’s it for now. Tomorrow we are going to see the whales, which in Spanish translates to “I’m going to ruin another expensive camera on a rickety boat out in the ocean.”