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New deals from Janus and CSC

Our good buddies at Janus Motorcycles have a special deal for ExhaustNotes readers…if you mention ExhaustNotes when ordering a new motorcycle, Janus will give you a free polished stainless steel exhaust upgrade (or anything else of equivalent value). Just click here to get to the Janus order page.

I had a grand time on the Janus Baja adventure ride, and these are unique motorcycles. Janus motorcycles are handcrafted gems with an exquisite fit and finish, and they gather crowds wherever they go.

Devin Biek, one of the Janus co-founders, putting a Gryffin through its paces on our Baja adventure ride.

Here’s more news, this time from CSC Motorcycles. CSC has announced new colors for their 2019 TT250 motorcycle, which include subtle letter decal color changes on the white and black versions of the bike, and an all new blue color (a first on the TT250).

The 2019 TT250 colors. The 2019 bikes should be in the US in a couple of weeks.

These are cool colors on the new TT250s, and at $2,195, this motorcycle has to be one of the best deals on the planet. I have a black one and I love the bike. To get to the CSC order page, you can click here.

The Motley Fool weighs in…

The Motley Fool is an investment advisory service newsletter I’ve been following since the 1990s, and my take on things is they generally have good advice and make predictions that have proven to be sound. Most recently, The Motley Fool published an article (Harley-Davidson Really Misjudged the Electric Motorcycle Market) about Harley’s Livewire electric motorcycle. Their take on the new Harley is the same as ours…Harley’s marketing muscle and distribution channels will help, but the idea of a $35K+ electric motorcycle nearly guarantees a dead-on-arrival introduction. The Motley Fool piece is well reasoned and mirrors our earlier prediction. Let’s hope both we and The Motley Fool are wrong.

To Serve Road Racing

Motorcycle road racing has taken quite a beating in America. The biggest stars are overseas and the entire series (whoever runs it) has become sort of a Triple A, minor league pastime. There are some really great riders in our pavement series but none of it seems to translate to The Bigs.

What if we combined road racing with a homegrown series featuring riders that are already the best in the world? Flat track racing has factory involvement, the best riders, a full-figured schedule and reliable fan participation. What if we went back to the past and named an overall Number 1 rider using the total points scored from each series? Road racing and flat track points were scored this way back in the 1970’s before the AMA debased the value of the #1 plate by splitting the championship into two. American road race wins need to become more valuable, more meaningful and with a tight overall championship on the line the top flat trackers would no longer be able to ignore asphalt. With so many more dirt events the best road racers would have to dabble in the dirt.

Would we see Mees on a factory Indian road race bike scoring a few pavement points to keep his dominant championship streak going? Would JD Beach win the #1 plate several times in a row, as he seems the most multi-talented? Would a dark horse, semi-privateer like Carver show a natural talent on the asphalt and go on to win at Moto GP? What if Shayna Texter turned out to be a beast on the twisting streets of COTA and showed a wheel to Marquez? This mixing of talent and styles gave the US years of GP dominance in the past and it will do it again.

I know the existing sanctioning bodies would never come together on this series. It requires compromise and a desire to put the common good above fractured fiefdoms battling for fans. That’s why we need a third, Rotisserie League type Series that sponsors the new championship without actually being involved in sanctioning races.

This piggy backed, Lamprey League would tabulate the scores from both road racing and flat track events and award prize money accordingly. (Like the old Camel Pro championships) Freed from having any association with either of the race promoters or even needing their blessing, anyone with deep enough pockets could be a sponsor. Red Bull, Booze sellers, and cigarette makers even the web site Vice could jump on board. An entire Virtual Championship Series with its own advertising, racer interviews and social media platforms would run parallel and concurrent with the physical races.

With True #1 championship money on the line racers would switch back and forth between the two racing disciplines, all the while improving their ability on both surfaces and scoring virtual points. It’s a win for everybody involved and it’s a big win for whoever gets that unified #1 plate.

Rob’s project bike…

I received an interesting email from my good buddy Rob a couple of nights ago. Rob is an interesting guy…I rode with him on the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride described in 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM, and then again on one of the Baja trips.

Rob’s mascot on a bike he calls “Donkey Hoty.”

Here’s Rob’s note to me, along with some very interesting photos…

Hi Joe,

Hope your living life to the fullest. I really enjoy you and Gresh’s ExhaustNotes and keeping up with you.

Anyways its very cold up here and to kill time I’ve been looking at Ball and Cap pistols and wondered if you had any experience shooting, loading, etc. with them? Any further plans on an east coast RX3 trip or Alaska?

If your ever up here in the Pacific Northwest area , give me a shout. Maybe I can meet up with you somewhere.

Not sure this year where all my bikes will take me. My favorite rally in Hells Canyon is done and over with and she’s looking for another venue place to host it. I may try and get to the beater bike rally in Hood River. I’m working on a Kawasaki KZ440 that I took the motor out of and put in a Harbor Freight 212cc lawn mower motor in it with a cheap torque converter so its an centrifugal clutch auto like a big mini bike. If I can get it to go fast enough (45-55mph) I may try and ride down to rally from Walla Walla.

Hope all is well with you and yours Joe.

Take care,

Rob

Rob calls his new bike Einstein, and like Donkey Hoty, he has a hood ornament to match.

Rob, your project bike is fascinating. Please keep us posted on how it progresses. The centrifugal clutch concept on a full-figured motorcycle is interesting. Mustang (i.e., the original California-manufactured Mustang of the 1950s) offered a centrifugal clutch bike in the 1950s they named after their original offering (the Colt), and the one I saw owned by Al Simmons and later Steve Seidner was a real beauty.

A ’56 Mustang Colt. It had a centrifugal clutch. The Mustang Motor Products Corporation positioned this bike as a lower-priced Mustang, but it was a commercial flop.

Mustang’s intent was not to offer a bike with an “automatic” transmission; what they were really after was a value-engineered version of the Mustang. It had the standard Mustang 322cc flathead engine, but a centrifugal clutch replaced the Berman transmission and the bike had Earles-type forks instead of the Mustang’s telescopic forks. The factory workers didn’t like it and there was some talk of efforts to sabotage the ones leaving the plant. The one I saw was beautiful. It flopped in the market, which was unfortunate. When I worked at CSC, we’d routinely get calls from folks asking if we had any bikes that had an automatic transmission. The answer, of course, was no. But I think this sort of thing could work on a small displacement bike for folks who don’t know how to (or don’t want to) shift. I know you do and I know you are doing this just to have fun. But I think you are on to something here.

To answer your other questions….I have zero experience with black powder guns, other than to watch my good buddy Paul build custom black powder rifles and play with them. I once bought a Uberti .44 Model 1858 sixgun and it looked to be very well built, but a friend of mine wanted one and I sold it to him without ever having fired it.

I don’t have any east coast RX3 or other plans at this time. I’m too busy planning for the next Baja trip, I guess.

The beater rally you mention sounds pretty cool, and I love the Hood River area of the Columbia River Gorge. That sounds like it might be fun!

How did we miss this?

Boy oh boy am I embarrassed! Good buddy John Burns listed Moto Baja as one of the 10 Best Books for Motorcyclists for 2018 a month or so ago and it went right by me!

John, thanks very much!

Want to see all our books? Take a look right here.

Want to know a secret? Gresh and I have a couple of new books in the works. You’ll read about them right here on the ExhaustNotes blog!

Would you like to be entered in our quarterly contest for a free moto adventure book? Just sign up for our automatic email updates!

Zed’s Not Dead: Part 15

Zed’s forward progress has come to a temporary halt. Not due to any complications on the Kawasaki’s part, although the project has exceeded my initial estimate by double and I’m not done yet. No, Pitiful Man has to strike a balance between work and play. He must strive to appease the gods and their fickle ways while angering none. It’s a fine line we walk and sometimes we have to dance atop a vibrating string.

A quick trip to Florida was in order as the Love Shack, our singlewide trailer in the Ocala Forest, was showing signs of neglect. CT and I freshened the grey floor paint and installed new back porch pavers, eliminating the sad little stoop that had served us poorly for 14 years. While we were at it some new window shades, new screen doors and a lick of paint on the Lido Deck were in the cards. Another project I started 14 years ago, installing sliding closet doors, was finally brought to a conclusion. When we were finished the place looked like a hundred bucks.

Back at Tinfiny Ranch in New Mexico another, larger project had to be tackled: a twenty-foot by thirty-foot concrete floor in the tin shed. I’ve decided to tackle the shed floor in stages, like the International Six Days Trial. Stage one will be Bay Number 1 (a little confusing because an additional bay, Bay Zero, was added to the shed after the other three bays had been named). This stage consists of 16 individually poured slabs of which I have 9 complete as of this writing. After the slabs are in place a shear wall will be built to add strength to the flimsy metal shed and also divide the space into a Bay 2 and 3 dirt floor, rat-accessible side, and a Bay 1 concrete, non-rat accessible side.

Those faithful Zed’s Not Dead readers that have not deserted me will recall Part One where I describe Zed’s crooked path back and home. After we bought Tinfiny Ranch I discovered a trove of paperwork from Zed’s previous owner. Several motorcycle magazines from the era featuring Zed were in a box along with a possible explanation for the Zed’s wiring issues described elsewhere in this series.

This letter dated August 3rd 1994 from Ken Rogers representing Dyna III ignitions (I’m guessing not the singer) explains to the previous owner how they have thoroughly tested the electronic ignition he sent back and have proclaimed it fit as a fiddle. Zed’s burned-up wiring harness may have been due to a faulty Dyna ignition installation. This would also account for the wiring to the coils being cut as those short bits were spliced into the Dyna module. I never found any of the Dyna stuff in my initial clean up but I haven’t gone through all the old guy’s junk.

Along with the Dyna stuff there was a lot of Yoshimura brochures and price lists. After seeing the damage to the wiring harness on Zed I’m torn between hoping my bike has some nice performance parts installed and fearing that my bike has some nice performance parts installed. I should be able to measure the cams to see if they have additional lift but I’m not sure how to check displacement without winning an AMA national road race. I suspect the Yoshi stuff was bench dreaming because the bike runs too well to be hot rodded.

Finally here’s a nice photo from Dale-Starr of David Aldana winning the Daytona superbike race with a half-lap lead over the guy in second place. Apparently this caused protests that required Aldana’s bike to be disassembled twice! The bike was found legal and Aldana’s win stood. I met Aldana at Barberville one year. I was so excited to meet him I started doing the “We’re not worthy!” Wayne’s World bowing thing and Aldena told me to knock it off.

While no real work has been done to Zed in Part 15 I’ve enjoyed digging through Zed’s past. Reading the old magazine reviews reinforces just how spectacular the Kawasaki Z1 900 was when it came out in 1973. And how spectacular a motorcycle it still is.

Want to catch the rest of the Zed story? Hey, just click right here!

Another cool watch…

Here’s another blog I posted a couple of years ago on the CSC blog, and this one is about a watch. Yeah, I make no excuses…I’m a watch guy. This one is one of my favorites.

img_2749-650 — My self-winding Orient watch. It’s a classy dress piece, and it’s one of my favorites.

Okay, it’s time for another watch story, and this one goes like this: 40+ years ago when I was a young Army officer in Korea, some of my guys purchased Japanese Orient watches (Orient was the brand name; it had nothing to do with our location in Asia). That was in the mid-1970s, I was just a young pup, and those were the good old days when you could buy a Rolex at the Post Exchange for $300.

Rolex, Schmolex. Who in their right mind, I remember thinking back then, would spend $300 for a watch? $300 for a Rolex. Ah, if I only knew. But that’s a tangential story. Back to the main attraction…

Anyway, I never heard of the Orient brand again until somebody posted a photo of a really cool Orient diver’s watch on the ADVRider.com “Shiny Things” thread. That lit up a long-lost memory neuron or two and I looked for Orient watches on Google. I didn’t want another diver’s watch, but I saw a really cool Orient watch on the OrientUSA website. It was a moonwatch (not like the Bulova Apollo 15 watch I posted about a week or so ago, but a watch that had a complication showing whether it was day or night). I know, the whole thing is kind of silly…I mean, other than the guy who sang Love Potion No. 9, who doesn’t know if it’s day or night? It was a men’s dress watch in rose gold (that’s a kind of pink-looking gold) with a brown leather alligator band. (At least, I think it’s alligator. Maybe it’s crocodile. Never could tell those two lizards apart, except if you see one later it’s most likely an alligator, and if you don’t see one again for a while, well, it’s probably a crocodile. Or so I’ve been told.)

I liked the looks of the Orient Moon Watch. A lot. I sent an email to Orient, they responded to my question and included a discount code in case I decided to order a watch. One thing led to another, and my new Orient arrived via UPS a few days later. I really like it. It’s a self-winding mechanical watch (as a mechanical engineer, that appeals greatly to me), like I said above it’s rose gold (which I like a lot), and it’s just cool. It’s beautiful, actually. When I shot the above photo, it told me the sun was out (it’s wasn’t, because it had been raining bigly out here, but you get the idea).

So the Orient watch proved to be a great buy. It’s very accurate, and it’s completely mechanical. No batteries, no solar gizmos, no hookup to an iPhone, and it works the way it is supposed to. A year or two ago on one of the CSC Baja trips, one of the guys on that ride (good buddy Patrick) made a point of showing me his self-winding mechanical Orient watch, which he purchased after I wrote about mine on the CSC blog. I guess the old adage is true…if you have a great product (and I think Orient does), the word gets around.

Good buddy Patrick, a fellow Orient watch guy, in Guerrero Negro on the Baja 2017 ride.

So that’s it for now. I’ve got to hit up Orient for my commission on Patrick’s watch, and I’m ready for the sunshine. Yesterday was supposed to be the last day of our So Cal rainstorm saga, and I’m hoping that’s going to be the case. I want to get out and ride. My motorcycles have been sitting in the garage for too long. It’s time to get some motorcycle stuff back up on the ExNotes blog!

Precipitation, polarities, headgear, and gobble gobble…

The rain has been nonstop here for the last several days, and for the last couple of nights it’s rained so hard that it woke me up a few times. I guess nearly all of California is getting drenched. It’s too wet to ride and it’s too wet to shoot, so I’ve been catching up on other stuff.

On that shooting bit…to get to my gun club you have to drive down a dirt road for a couple of miles, and at one point the road actually crosses a stream. Usually it’s only a couple of inches deep and sometimes it’s even dry, but that sure isn’t the case right now. The gun club sent out an email yesterday afternoon with a video warning folks not to try to drive across the stream (which is now a little river)…

So, with all this rain (and some hail) I’ve been attending to other things…catching up on writing a couple of articles, doing a bit of reloading, and I even put a new battery in my TT250.

Reloading is a good thing to do on a rainy day, and the menu today included .44 Magnum and .45 AutoRim, two of my all-time favorite cartridges.

.44 Mag loads for more accuracy testing in the new Ruger Turnbull Super Blackhawk. These loads have a 240 grain cast bullet with Unique loaded at 9.0 grains, 10.0 grains, and 11.0 grains. We’ll see which load the Turnbull prefers.

.45 AutoRim ammo. This cartridge is just like the .45 ACP, except the rim allows shooting it in revolvers chambered for the .45 ACP without the use of metal clips. This is a 200 grain moly-coated cast bullet with 6.0 grains of Unique, and it is a shooter!

Shooting the .45 AutoRim cartridge in a Model 625 Smith and Wesson last week before the rains started. That’s 100 rounds at 25 yards. The two outside the black happened when a fly landed on my front sight. Or maybe it was a sudden gust of wind. Or maybe I sneezed. Yeah, that was it.

Back to the battery for my TT250…I’ve owned my TT250 for close to three years now and the battery finally gave up the ghost. I stopped in at CSC and told Steve I wanted a new one on the warranty, and we both had a good laugh about that. Steve told me I was the only guy he knew who could get that kind of life out of a Chinese battery. I thought that was kind of funny because all the batteries are Chinese now.

Seriously, though, I think the reason my batteries last so long is that I usually keep them on a Battery Tender. Those things work gangbusters for me, the bikes run better when the batteries are kept fully charged, and the batteries seem to last a good long time. You can buy a Battery Tender most anywhere; my advice would be to get one (or more) from CSC. They come with a little pigtail you can permanently install on your battery, which makes connecting the Battery Tender a snap. I have one on both my RX3 and my TT250.

I rotate the battery between my RX3 and my TT250, and the batteries seem to last a lot longer. I don’t know why anyone who owns any motorcycle wouldn’t have one of these.

The Battery Tender pigtail on my RX3. You can’t get the polarity wrong on these if you’ve connected the pigtail to the battery correctly. You get a pigtail for free when you buy a Battery Tender.

Another bit of a commercial for CSC…the mailman dropped off a box on Saturday, and it was one of the new CSC hats. I’m a hat guy. I like wearing a hat. My favorite kind of hat is a free one. The CSC hat I received was free (thanks, Steve), but unless you wrote a blog for CSC for 10 years, it’s not likely you’d get yours for free. I think they sell for $19.95, which is a bit above what hats normally go for, but this one is more than worth it. It’s got cool embossed stitching and it looks good. I like it and I think it will make me a better man. Like I said, $19.95 ain’t bad, but maybe you could get one for free as part of the deal when you buy a new CSC motorcycle. I’d at least ask the question. The worst that could happen is Steve will say no. But if he does that, ask for a free copy of 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM when you buy your new motorcycle. You never know.

I got a free hat from CSC. Gresh didn’t. At least not yet, he didn’t. Seriously, these are nice hats.

Hey, here’s one more cool photo. I’ve been spending a bit of time up in northern California. I have a new grandson up there who I think is going to be a rider, a shooter, and a blog writer. On that blog writing thing, I told him it’s a great foundation for any “get rich slow” scheme, and I think he gets it. Anyway, my wife Sue is still up there, and she saw the neighborhood brood of wild turkeys this morning walking around like they own the place…

Genuine Screaming Turkey performance parts? It could work…

You know, there was some talk of making the turkey our national bird instead of the bald eagle when our country first formed (Ben Franklin was pushing for the turkey, but I guess the rest of the founding fathers told him to go fly a kite). As an aside, when I ride up to northern California, I take Highway 152 across from Interstate 5 to the 101, and there’s a tree where I always see one or two bald eagles. Bald eagles are majestic raptors. I can see the logic behind the turkey, though. But wow, would it ever take a rethink of a lot of marketing stuff, and in particular, it would make for a major revamp of one particular Motor Company’s marketing and branding efforts (you know, the guys from Milwaukee). Seriously, their performance parts would all have to be marketed under a new Screaming Turkey brand. You could bask in the assumed glory of your motorcycle’s heritage as you rode like, well, a real turkey. Perhaps the Company could get a patent on a new exhaust note….one that would have to change from “potato potato” to “gobble gobble.” There would have to be new logos, tattoos, T-shirts…the list just doesn’t end. But I guess I had better. You know, before I offend anyone.

Stay tuned, folks. Like always, there’s more good ExNotes stuff coming your way. Gobble gobble.

Six Turning and Four Burning

It’s hard to imagine: Six gigantic piston engines and four jet engines, all on the same airplane. That’s what was on the B-36, manufactured by General Dynamics in Fort Worth, Texas. This video popped up in my YouTube feed a short while ago, and I thought I would include it here…

When I first watched that video, I thought the background looked familiar. I quickly realized it was filmed at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas. You can see the General Dynamics plant in some of the scenes. The company was called Convair in those days, then it became General Dynamics, and still later it became Lockheed Martin (which is what it is today). There’s been a lot of consolidation in the aerospace industry. Anyway, to get back to the story, that body of water you see in the video is Lake Worth (it’s at the west end of the Carswell runway).

I worked at General Dynamics in the 1970s. GD shared the main runway with Carswell AFB. I was on the F-16 engineering team, and those were great days. It was my first job after the Army, and those days at GD were heady times for me. The F-16 was a grand engineering program, but one of the best parts about working at General Dynamics four decades ago was listening to the old timers. You know, the engineers who had cut their teeth on the B-36 program. I used to love their stories about the B-36, which was designed and manufactured in that very same General Dynamics plant. I worked for a guy named Lou Rackley. Just like I was starting my engineering career on the F-16, Lou had started on the B-36. Those fellows talked about the B-36 program like it was the grandest thing there ever was. Maybe it was.

Here’s a sampling of what I learned from Lou about that magnificent old warbird. The B-36 had a wingspan greater than a Boeing 747. The B-36 was so big it had to move down the assembly turned sideways, and our assembly line at GD/Fort Worth was the largest manufacturing facility in the non-Communist world. The B-36 tail was so tall they had to jack the nose 18 feet into the air to get the tail down far enough so the airplane would fit through the door at the end of the assembly plant. The B-36 fuselage was mostly bomb bays, and to get from the nose of the plane to the rear, you had to lay flat on your back on a rolling dolly and pull yourself along through a pressurized tube. Every once in a while someone would be in that tube, in flight, when a depressurization occurred, and that guy would be launched like a cannonball from one end of the airplane to the other. They had a few instances where folks were working in the wheel wells when the landing gear doors closed inadvertently, and that story didn’t end well.

While I was at GD, the company restored a B-36 and displayed it near the main highway that led into the plant. It was quite an airplane, and I enjoyed seeing it when I rode my Harley and later, my Triumph to work each morning. Good times indeed.

I spent 3 years in Fort Worth on the F-16 program before they transferred me to California, where my focus turned to munitions and tactical weapon systems for the next 20 years. I have a few grand stories of my own about the F-16 and the later munitions programs I worked on, but those are topics for another time.

The Three Flags Classic: Day 4

Day 4 was a grand day on our 2005 Three Flags Classic adventure! Before you get into it, and if you haven’t read the first three days, you might want to catch up by reading our prior blog posts here:

The 2005 Three Flags Classic Rally: the Intro!

The Three Flags Classic: Day 1

The Three Flags Classic: Day 2

The Three Flags Classic: Day 3

On to Day 4!

Day 4 of the 2005 Three Flags Classic. We started in Driggs, Idaho, and we stopped to spend that night in Whitefish, Montana.

I did a dumb thing on the 2005 Three Flags Classic. Well, actually, I did it about a week before. In those days, I was using my Triumph Daytona as a daily commuter, and on the way into work one day, I had picked up a nail in my rear tire. The tire didn’t go flat right away. Nope, we had to make a trip to China Lake later that morning, I rode my Daytona there from the San Bernardino area, and the tire decided to go flat in China Lake. It was a lucky break for me. There’s a lot of nothing on Highway 395 in the Mojave Desert, and the Daytona had the good manners to go flat once we were in town.

Fortunately, there was an independent motorcycle repair shop in China Lake, and he plugged the tire for me. The Daytona ran tubeless tires, and pulling the nail and plugging the tire was no big deal. That’s where I screwed up. I should have replaced the tire, but I didn’t, and it was just one week later that we were off on the Three Flags Classic.

Well, that morning in Driggs, Idaho when I mounted the Triumph and pushed it back, it wouldn’t budge. That’s when the coffee kicked in and I realized the bike wasn’t leaning as much as it should on the sidestand. Uh oh, I thought. I got off the bike, and sure enough, the rear tire was flatter than day-old beer. It was cold that morning, and I was looking forward to getting on the road and feeling the glow from my Gerbing electric vest. What was I thinking, I thought. It was at that moment that I realized that leaving home with a plugged tire had been a dumb move.

Marty had one of those little electrical compressors you attach to your motorcycle battery, so we hooked everything up. Damn, those things take a long time. I’ll bet we sat there for a good 20 minutes, before the sun came up, with Marty’s BMW idling and that very noisy little electric pump banging away. It took that long to get the tire inflated, and I pumped it up to 45 psi reckoning that I would need to either find a new tire or pump it up again most rickety scosh.

I guess I had done okay (or rather, the Triumph’s rear tire had) until I started taking some of the sweepers at high speed the day before in Idaho. A couple of Three Flags riders on FJRs passed me, and we played cat and mouse with those guys for a while. We took the turns at high speed, which probably flexed the tires more than the usual amount, and that most likely loosened the plug that had been installed in China Lake.

We were on our way after pumping up my flat in Driggs, and when we stopped at a gas station somewhere later that morning I found that the pressure had dropped to about 20 psi. So, I plugged the thing again. The new plug would hold all the way to Calgary, and that was a good thing, because I didn’t see another motorcycle shop until we reached that destination. I wised up and bought a new tire in Calgary, but that’s a story for the next blog in this series.

This is the gas station in Idaho where I re-plugged my rear tire. And it worked. While we were there, a kid pulled up in a yellow dune buggy. We had an interesting conversation and then we were back on the road.

The next day took us into Wyoming. Wyoming had magnificent scenery. We stopped at a bunch of great locations to take it all in. The best parts, for me, were the riding, the photography, and the interesting folks we met along the way who were also riding the 2005 Three Flags Classic. The oldest rider in this event was 89 years old. He received a standing ovation at the banquet a couple of nights later in Calgary. The youngest was 17 years old.

I took this picture somewhere in Wyoming. This is John and Joyce, married 45 years. They rode in from Virginia to participate, each on their own motorcycle. They won the award for the longest distance traveled to participate in the Three Flags Classic.

We stopped for lunch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It was touristy as hell. It had some great photo ops, but the prices were crazy and the traffic matched the prices. I’d never been there before, so I was glad to make the stop for bragging rights. But (trust me on this) Jackson Hole is not the real Wyoming.

This is Jackson Hole, a tourist town, but with good eats. We had a great Mexican dinner there. The arch is made out of real antlers, and there are four arches like this at the corners of the town square.

A door handle on one of the many art galleries in Jackson Hole.

Later that day and we rode into Montana. Montana is another beautiful state. In fact, the scenery on the entire trip was unbelievable. We also saw a lot of game. I saw an entire herd of deer in Montana.

It was getting very cold. I was glad I was riding the Triumph, and I was glad I had that Gerbing electric vest. The Triumph threw off a lot of engine heat, which is not a good thing in the summertime, but it was wonderful in the cold weather. And, that electric vest was heavenly.

Later that day, we hit the checkpoint in Missoula, Montana. It was good to stop for a while and chat with the other riders. Here are several photos from that checkpoint…

Good buddy Bob’s RT-P BMW at the checkpoint in Missoula, Montana. These are amazing machines. Bob can ride any motorcycle he chooses (he owns a BMW dealership, Brown BMW in Pomona, California), and this is his weapon of choice.

Bob’s route card. When I wrote The Complete Book of Police and Military Motorcycles a few years ago, I learned a lot about these police Beemers. They are impressive machines. Two batteries, a stronger alternator, an oil cooler, and ABS braking. Plus the normal BMW niceties, like heated handgrips.

This Gold Wing is actually one of the oldest bikes in the event. We spoke with the rider for a bit, and he told us that this bike is on its fourth engine.

Check out the mileage on this Canadian Gold Wing! 900,000 kilometers! That’s well over a half million miles!

Carl and his beautiful K1200LT BMW at the checkpoint in Missoula.

This rider and his wife flew in from the Netherlands to participate in the Three Flags Classic. He had never been to Mexico, Canada, or the United States. A friend let him borrow this yellow DL1000 Suzuki. Like all of us, he and his wife were having a grand time.

One of the FJR riders. The FJR is a very impressive machine.

That night, we stayed in Whitefish, Montana, just south of the Canadian border. We walked into town from our hotel and found a microbrewery, and we had a fabulous dinner. Whitefish is a cool town. We walked around a bit and then called it night. The next morning we would ride in Canada on Day 5 of the 2005 Three Flags Classic!

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