Racing the Sun

By Mike Huber 

Finding myself in Arizona in the winter months has become my norm.  Arizona provides one of the better climates for riding and camping, and I can camp there without waking up next to a frozen Gatorade bottle in my tent (which happens way too often to me).

Over the past three years wintering here I had missed one of the more moving Veterans Day memorials, the Anthem Veterans Memorial in Anthem, Arizona.  This fascinating tribute to our country’s Soldiers, Airmen, Marines, Sailors, and Coast Guard (no Space Force yet) is located just two minutes off Interstate 17.

I visited the Veterans Memorial on several occasions while stopping at the Starbucks in Anthem (insert BMW GS joke here) before riding to work in Phoenix or Tucson.  What makes the Anthem Veterans Memorial so special is that on November 11th at 11:11, the sun aligns with the Memorial and shines directly through its five pillars (each pillar represents a branch of the military).  That lights the Great Seal of the United States of America.  The pillar heights correspond with the number of people in each branch (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard).

This year when I rode my GS to Phoenix for routine maintenance, I saw the sign on I-17 for the Memorial. I looked down and it was 11:08.  I had a chance to make it!  Pulling in my clutch and clicking down two gears brought me to this new destination. It was exhilarating. I was literally racing the sun to be where I needed to be at 11:11.

I didn’t make it in time. Only five minutes or so had passed, but the eclipse of the Great Seal was not in totality anymore.  That is how accurate this modern-day sun dial is. The radiant glow from it was still vibrant and even though it wasn’t in full on totality it was still very impressive.

Many people surrounded the Memorial this day; more than a few rode motorcycles here as a Veterans Day Pilgrimage. It is always a great day whenever I chat with Veterans, especially at such an impressive monument on Veterans Day.

Having been so close to seeing this Memorial at its peak has placed it on my 2023 list.  I will join other Veterans riding to the Memorial and the festivities on this special day, and Starbucks will be part of the experience to meet my BMW GS ownership obligations.


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Naco Taco Thanksgiving Run

By Mike Huber

For most, Thanksgiving is a time to spend with family and friends watching football and performing the “eat, drink, nap, repeat” cycle.  This is, of course, never a bad way to spend this holiday but finding myself in Bisbee, Arizona I thought changing it up from the traditional turkey feast would be beneficial.

Bisbee, Arizona is a late 1880s copper mining town that turned in its explosives, shovels, and rock drills to grow into a more artistic town with historic hotels, quirky shops, and lots of festivals.  Being that this tiny community is nestled in the canyons of southernmost Arizona (just minutes from the Mexican border), an idea struck me.  I had not visited Mexico since February, and although this sounds crazy, I was craving tacos.  Being this close to Mexico it felt almost a necessity to partake in a run to the border to extinguish my craving.

Fifteen minutes later I found myself parking the car and walking about 50 yards through a turnstile much like you would see in a New York City subway entrance.  It was that easy and I was in Naco, Mexico.  Another 200 yards and I was at a restaurant called Asadero Los Molcajetes which I had frequented several times when I crossed on my BMW GS to ride mainland Mexico.  This restaurant to me always represented the gateway to Mexico and was a symbol of happiness.

Asadero Los Molcajetes is a perfect stop for when you are riding across and must get your visa stamped and the bikes inspected since it is right next to where you have those tasks completed.  The restaurant provides you the opportunity to celebrate entering Mexico with some outstanding tacos (along with a cold Pacifico or margarita) to wash them down, while taking in that special moment to realize that your trip has officially begun.

The tacos were exactly what I had been craving.  Even before the tacos were served, we had a large plate of several different hot sauces.  Chips, cucumbers, and onions rounded out this first course.  Usually, chips in any Mexican restaurant are one of my biggest diet downfalls.  They put that bowl out and its rare I don’t require it to be reloaded prior to my food arriving.  By then I am much too full to fully enjoy the meal.  This time, however, I managed what little self-control I have and made sure to go easy so that I could enjoy the carne asada tacos.

The brilliance of Mexico is that when you order two tacos, there is an extra shell underneath.  This is for when all that deliciousness of your fully loaded taco falls out. BOOM! You now have a third taco!

After four tacos (six with the extra shells and my sloppiness) I felt just as full as I would have had I eaten a normal Thanksgiving feast. It was time to burn off a few calories by walking around Naco before my 200-yard journey back to the United States. Returning to the United States was just as easy as entering Mexico. “Reason for your trip to Mexico, sir?”.  I simply stated, “Thanksgiving tacos, sir,” and I was waved through.

A unique Thanksgiving for sure and as I drove back to Bisbee, I could feel it was time for a solid nap. The nap would signify completing the “eat, drink, nap, repeat” cycle.  I next started wondering how late Asadero Los Molcajetes was open for the possibly of Cycle Number Two.


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The Ride

“I am slowly dying every day I am here”

It was April 2017 and that was the thought that kept going through my head. I was living in Seattle and it was one of the grayest winters in Pacific Northwest history. According to meteorological scientists, there had been only thirty hours of sunlight from October to May. I was working remotely; a strange, novel existence that in a young and lighter life was referred to as telecommuting. To work remotely is to live semidetached from the rest of society. At times, it feels as though you are physically invisible to the world; literally, a digital personality.  Of course, this was before the global pandemic came in and made remote work the new normal for those of us fortunate enough to have a job. I had begun losing motivation in my work and in most other aspects of life and it wasn’t just the weather. Maybe it was the fact that I wore the same ratty Boston University hoodie every day that winter and ate Shin Ramen for two of my three meals a day. Maybe it was that the people I saw in the streets and places I frequented seemed to be as isolated and disconnected as I was feeling at the time.

Looking back on those gray, empty, Seattle days I realize now that the need for freedom and openness was what finally forced me to make such a drastic change. I needed a hard reset of my current mindset and environment, one that would revolve around my passion for riding motorcycles. I wanted to take the check-mated chess game that had become my life and forearm-swipe the whole thing across the room, kind of like the Jack Nicholson diner scene in Five Easy Pieces.

So that is exactly what I decided to do.

New game

I decided I was going to put the Jet City in my rearview mirror and travel the country on my Ducati Monster M1100. This torquey little machine had a dry clutch with a stiff pull, which made a beautiful “clack clack clack” sound that reminded me of a WWII P-51 Mustang heading into a dog flight alone, against a squadron of Messerschmidts.  I loved my Monster, and we had seven good years together feeling the wind in our hair and the angry vibes of the 1100 CC v-twin engine on two-lane roads all over this amazing country. I had even camped off this sleek little machine during a memorable ride down the coast to San Francisco. To me the Ducati Monster M1100 is everything that a motorcycle should be. Nothing extra, and nothing less. In fact, the only thing that bike wasn’t fit for was the journey I was about to take.

The Plan

The high-level plan was to head east on I-90, blaze through E-WA and Idaho in one go, not stopping until I hit the unadulterated freedom of open space called Montana. I would camp every chance I could in the open-air majesty of perhaps our greatest treasure; America’s National Forests. I planned to visit National Parks, and stop to see every UFO landing site and giant ball of string that caught my eye. Most importantly, I would make sure that my thirst for the road on a fossil fuel burning two-wheeler was quenched on a daily basis. I would live in Airbnb’s during the week, feeding my pencil thin bank account by logging in to my nine to five via laptop as an IT project manager.  Although I did fine at my job, I had this unique perspective that work was a vehicle, a vehicle that when pointed in the right direction and driven with the right intent could be used to feed my hunger for riding, camping, and living life in a way that I would not regret when my last days arrived. Monday through Friday I would continue to persevere in my career. Weekends, however, would be all mine and I intended to max each one out with the whistle of speed in my ears and a thick coating of dead insects on my face-shield.

Seattle

The weather finally broke in May. I greeted the first rays of sun with squinted eyes, dangerously low vitamin D levels and steaming cup of Starbucks, which would be my last for a while. I loaded the Ducati with all my gear and took a step back to look things over. The packing list was dangerously minimal, yet the bike looked like something off of Sanford and Son. My gear was just too much for the journey I had planned on the Ducati.

I had to make a difficult decision, one that I had been stewing on for years, in fact. Some might call it an up-grade, some might call it the death of romance. Some might call it the end of the sexy and lyrical object worship and variable reliability that is the result of Italian design and engineering. That day… that fateful day, I traded my Ducati Monster in for a BMW GS1200.

Coming out of the closet as an adventure rider

I now had the perfect bike for the adventure and the lifestyle I was about to launch into. I had no idea it would lead to an all-consuming life obsession that would take me some 50,000 plus miles down every type of road imaginable on one excursion after another with no end in sight.  When I departed Seattle on that first sunny day in May I remember thinking “I’ll just cruise out to Montana tomorrow and get to know my new machine.” My plan was light on detail and I told myself I’d deal with that, well, tomorrow. Besides, spring was in the air and I had never spent more than a few days in Montana, and that was years earlier. I had been headed in the opposite direction then, and running on Red Bull and fumes, hunched over the Ducati’s bars on a laser-focused run down the entire length of I-90 from Fenway Park in Boston all the way to Seattle’s Safeco Field.

That first day riding east was epic. As I left Seattle, I remembered the scene at the beginning of Easy Rider where Peter Fonda tossed his watch onto the desert sand as they kicked started their Vaughs and Hardy chops and blazed out eastward on their own adventure towards Mardi Gras. The day couldn’t have tasted better. The smell of Spring was thick in the cool morning air. The sky opened up as if to reassure me I had made the right choice and would be there to support and guide me in this liberating endeavor. The enormous evergreens of the coast became steadily shorter, fewer and far between until they disappeared and were replaced by tumbling sage and the open high desert of eastern Washington.

I don’t know how fast I was going but there was still a light mist coming off the Columbia as I cut through a vicious cross wind on the bridge at Vantage. The traffic thinned out with every mile as the quiet machine practically rode itself eastbound. Spokane, Coer’D’Alene, Post Falls, Idaho… Well hello Montana! I rolled into Whitefish and stopped for my first full meal since I had left out.  It wasn’t anything spectacular; a small brewery on the outskirts of town. I could have eaten a gas-station bologna sandwich on stale bread and been just as happy. I had made that leap and had landed squarely outside the hamster wheel, looking in. It felt like coming home.

Montana is a rider’s paradise.  With a rough plan of spending 2 weeks in Whitefish I would start by riding a road called Going to the Sun, which is a rare and beautiful collection of breathtaking views that you take in between sweeping switchback curves on good asphalt. The experience leaves you feeling unstoppable while the occasional grizzly bear sighting reassures you that your place in the food chain is not always at the top.

Going to the Sun was a life-changing road on a bike that would prove life-changing for me as well. The GS was silent compared to the Ducati. It had roll on power for the slow steady grades of the continental divide. I sat up high and took in the wildflowers of spring and the smells of Ponderosa and Lodgepole pine as I changed the GS’s road setting to sport mode, opened up the throttle and consumed mile after mile of sun-baked highway.

At some point in mid-June, I lit out of Whitefish on Forest Service roads, starting to get a feel for what the GS and I were capable of together. Hunter S. Thompson famously said, ‘The edge; the only ones who really know where it is, are the ones who have gone over.’ There were several times on that ride when I had to dust myself off and pick up all 650 pounds of fully loaded GS before pointing her east and rolling it on. A sort of cadence developed on those sandy mountain roads; drop the bike, swear a lot, cut the engine, swear some more, then pick her up, swear a bit more, onward and upward. It was all part of a steep learning curve that comes with all things worth doing, and I learned that lesson one dropped twenty thousand dollar German motorcycle at a time until the new car smell was all but washed off of her.

I was falling fast in love with my new bike and Montana too, and soon after Whitefish I made the decision to relocate to Missoula where I began taking weekend trips out to experience some of America’s most drooled over stretches of two-lane blacktop. One of those American roads I will never forget is the Beartooth Highway, which stretches between Red Lodge and the Northeast Entrance to Yellowstone. If we set foot on Mars in my lifetime, I may just volunteer to go. Until that happens I’ll have the Beartooth Highway; A pristine lunar landscape that is literally without end, show-casing snow-capped peaks that go on forever to your left, right and center.  The road going up Beartooth Pass is a chain of perfect hair-pin switchbacks so parabolically consistent that after a few awkward peg-scrapers I was able to lean the big GS in with a confidence reminiscent of my old Ducati. I experienced seventy-odd miles of rider’s paradise on this first outing from my new Missoula basecamp and finished the day dropping into Yellowstone, which, when it’s not choked off with Winnebagos and European tourists in black socks, is truly one of the seven wonders I have personally experienced on two wheels. You can camp on a pristine prairie and share the view with the bison who will roam freely around you as you grill up a rib-eye from one of their close cousins and enjoy a well-earned adult beverage in a tall can. This riding experience was something patently American; the stuff of childhood cowboy dreams and one I will never forget.

I hit Montana running, never planning more than twp weeks in advance and I never really stopped. The ride has been something enviable to those that understand. I am currently writing this sitting in front of a warm fire on this chilly June day in Lake City Colorado with the GS unloaded and parked where I can keep an eye on her. I will spend a few more weeks tearing up the asphalt and dirt in this geographically diverse state before setting sites on my next challenge.

I try to avoid the news, but it’s easy to see the world is spinning faster than ever these days. People seem to be polarizing more and more to where common ground is hard to find. In this unstable operating environment, you need to find a constant; a baseline; a solid rock that you can stand on, mentally and spiritually. Call it a ground-wire. For me, that constant is riding a motorcycle and the life that comes with it. Using the power of the ride to find common ground with people is one of the most magical talents I have learned to develop

So, as I continue on my ride, I am reminded that balance on two wheels requires constant motion. And like my last listless, restless winter in Seattle, there can be great tension in standing still. I think of the balance sometimes when I am polishing off a tall can, watching the crackling campfire reflect off the GS’s exhaust system, always parked close where I can keep an eye on her – after all, we are alone in a wild place. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that’s what keeps us together.


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Outriding the Pandemic

It was April and it was warm, even for the Arizona desert. A steady easterly breeze made the heat of the mid-day sun tolerable. We roared down back roads of the high plains that curved in wide arcs, past abandoned tourists traps and teepee hotels from the golden age of auto travel. The boxer engines of our BMW GS’s were humming in unison, interrupted by the whisper of dust devils that would whirl in from nowhere and dance in the center-line like mini tornadoes. I twisted the worn black rubber grip of the throttle and let myself slip into a deep state of attention to what the moment required. I was fully bonded with the machine that hurled me northward toward an ice cold India Pale Ale and a desert campsite I had yet to meet.

It had been some time since I felt this content and at peace. Over the past three months my girlfriend Bobbie and I had been watching the world burn down around us. Our pandemic hideout in Mexico felt like a grandstand seat at the races, and we had been awaiting a fiery crash at the finish line. I soaked in the sun’s rays through my riding suit and rolled the throttle on, savoring the feeling of heading home after months of uncertainty. Although riding north that day on Highway 89 was a fleeting moment, it was one that clicked and whirred in my memory like a Polaroid snapshot of harmony and integration with my surroundings. I was liking the feel of the TKC70 tires gripping the hot asphalt as I leaned the heavy machine through the curves with precision. It was the first time these tires had gripped American blacktop in 10 weeks. I could still almost smell the breeze coming off the sea of Cortez mixed with a slight hint of burning garbage like you get in Mexico along with the promise of wild nights, like it was before the plague sent us all running for the shadows.

Five Weeks Earlier

I woke up next to a beautiful girl in a turquoise room. The sun’s rays filtered in through translucent white curtains, embroidered with the flowers and skulls of Mexico’s Day of the Dead.  Loreto is a colonial beach town on the inland side of the Baja Peninsula. The room, an Airbnb, was our home this week.  I woke up slowly from an abnormally deep sleep. I blinked several times and let the humming of the air conditioner and the slow building sound of traffic on the street outside remind me where I was. I felt the stiffness of a slight hangover in my body. I caught a flash of last night’s events: Augie’s bar. A roar of laughter and music, conversation. I remember going into it looking forward to the fresh lime and rock salt taste of Margaritas and catching up with a couple riding GS800’s who had been playing leapfrog with us for several days as we all made our way up the peninsula.

I don’t know if you know any soldiers, or infantry soldiers, or paratroopers for that matter but we have a way of taking things to excess. There are a lot of reasons for it. Human behavior experts will site the scientifically low levels of impulse control found in those who perform dangerous jobs. Some blame the adrenaline. Some say it’s testosterone (women have it too, so don’t even start). Whatever it is, I think it has something to do with getting whatever enjoyment you can from life, while you can. The couple with the GS800s had some spectacular stories of their travels. I was not one to pass up an opportunity to swap tales of two-wheeled adventure, or pass up the highly flammable margaritas at Augie’s.

I got out of bed quietly and filled the small, hotel-style coffee maker with bottled water and some ground coffee that was dark and smelled promising. I liked the room. Sunlight streamed in and reflected off the brightly colored tile floor. A pair of parakeets outside the door were saying “buenos dias” over and over again to me or maybe to each other. Either way, it sounded extra loud. I blamed the cocktails from the night before as I took that first magic sip of black coffee. I looked over at Bobbie. She was out, curled up, still in a deep sleep. I eased myself into a faux-leather love-seat and cracked open my laptop. I logged onto the VPN and started preparing to get some work done when the google news crawl hit me like a concussion grenade. The US State Department had raised its global travel advisory to Level Four, something that had never happened before. Not ever. The message left no room for interpretation: “Return home now or plan to hunker down wherever you are for an indefinite period of time.” This was Defcon Four, for real.

As those words sunk in, my phone began to chirp with messages from friends and family north of the border. They were trying to relay the CDC and State Department warnings, and trying to figure out where I was, and push for my hasty return. The world was officially in a biological crisis, something we had prepared for during my time in the 82nd Airborne but had always prayed would never really happen. A few moments later my boss messaged me about COVID-19 and wanted to know if I was safe and sheltering in place. I told her that well, I was in Mexico and wasn’t exactly sure what to do. She corrected me and said “You mean you are in New Mexico.” I told her well, no. I am in old Mexico, like the real Mexico, on the Baja Peninsula, looking out over the Sea of Cortez at that very moment. There really wasn’t much to say after that and I was left alone with my phone, which went back to chirping along with the parakeets. I took another sip of coffee. I had some decisions to make. Although living free has some incredible benefits, like, well… freedom, lightness of being and of course the eternal spontaneity, there is always the lurking fact that having too many options can create a kind of analysis paralysis. As a wise man once said “Many a false move was made by standing still.” Well for those of us who suffer from a lack of impulse control, standing still is not really an option. So I threw on my trusty Levis and prepared for action.

I stepped out into the street and realized that an eerie silence had settled in over the town. We had passed through this way about four weeks ago. At that time it had all the trappings of a Baja tourist town; the bustling bars, restaurants, crowed sidewalks, coffee shops and art galleries. The historic Spanish Mission settlement of Loreto was now a ghost town. The streets were empty. Most of the businesses had closed, and many displayed signs warning tourists to return to wherever they came from. Within a couple of hours the decision had been made. It was time to ride north.

We loaded up the BMWs and headed out on Highway 1 north towards Gringolandia. Highway 1 is one of the most beautiful roads I have ever been lucky enough to ride. You navigate perfectly paved mountain switchbacks, complete with barrel cactus and rattlesnakes sunning themselves on the road until you begin a gradual decline towards the sparkling aquamarine blue water of the Bay of Conception. We decided to camp at a pristine little cove called Playa Santispac, a few miles south of the little mission town of Mulege.

We set up camp in a beachfront palapa and I had just set about gathering firewood when a couple in an RV next door waved us over to join their fire. I could smell mouth-watering carne asada, seasoned to perfection sizzling over the flames so I dropped the firewood and said we’d be right over. As Bobbie and I moved into the firelight, we noticed another couple was already sunk comfortably into camp chairs at the fire, cold Coronas in hand. It took all of a second to realize we had met this couple a month prior. We had been navigating the dirt roads way down on the southern tip of Baja outside of Cabo Pulmo National Park. We had passed a couple of hours with these folks then, swapping stories and trading experiences and recommendations from the road. The world had still been a carefree and dreamy place a month ago, and I slipped for a second into thinking about how much had changed and how quickly. Now, enjoying a fire and a seaside campsite together, we picked up right where we had left off, telling stories of where we’d been and where we were going from here.  North. The best thing about that evening was that no one mentioned COVID-19, or the world beyond the glow of that campfire, or the anxiety that was steadily growing inside each of us.

We ate carne asada tacos right out of the cast iron pan and clinked shot glasses of tequila to the sound of small waves lapping the shore. I watched the last light of the sun disappear behind silhouetted palms and scattered  palapas to the west. I thought that Baja must be one of the world’s most beautiful places. It felt solitary and secure. It felt like it was ours. Without anyone saying it, we knew we were existing in a sort of bubble of denial. We were living a nostalgia for the carefree times, which have now given way to something else, something less innocent to say the least. Denial and tequila are a pretty good recipe for happiness, at least for a while, and we all enjoyed the warmth of each other’s company and the peace that campfire  afforded us, even if it was just for one night.

Threading the Needle

Definition: Safely navigating a path through significant or numerous obstacles, which may be either social, figurative or physical in nature. In base-jumping, threading the needle refers to passing through a narrow gap between terrain features, probably while wearing a wingsuit or squirrel suit which generates lift and allows a controlled descent that feels like flying. Wingsuit flights usually end in the deployment of a parachute, or in death.

If you follow my road journal, you will know that I have been living off my motorcycle for the past three years. One thing I have learned in that time and those miles is the value of building solid friendships with the many amazing people I have met. One of these people is the Airbnb host we had stayed with back in February when our Baja adventure was just beginning. Veronica reminded me of Blanche from the Golden Girls. She was a blonde American woman from California. She had a high style and a kind of radiant energy to her. There were numerous stories of lovers past and present, and affairs won and lost like battles to a soldier who has traveled the world. Veronica had recently retired from a nursing career, and she administered her Airbnb with a level of caring and perfection fitting to that career. Veronica had adapted quite readily to the slower paced life of the Baja in the safe little community of San Felipe. She was one of the warmest people we had met on this trip and I made a point to keep in contact with her over the next two months as Bobbie and I explored every inch of the peninsula on our bikes. When the pandemic started ramping up, she sent me a text message to check on us and, learning that we were still in Mexico, again offered us shelter at her home.

San Felipe was just a 2-hour ride to the border, which seemed like an option we did not want to turn our backs on if one of us were to come down with COVID. Additionally, it seemed like we could remain pretty well isolated in Baja. It was a peninsula; not counting the countless maritime options, there was really only one way on and one way off that thin little strip of sand. Even if you counted boats, access to Baja was a lot more controlled than say, Mexico City, and our beloved USA was starting to look like a full-on dumpster fire if the TV and internet news sources could be believed. Plus, from what we could see, the residents of Baja seemed to be more or less following the health protocols of the CDC and the World Health Organization. Our plan was to thread the needle and return to America once the cases flat lined there or started to decrease. So essentially, we planned to cross the border after the worst had passed in the US but prior to the virus wave hitting Baja, which we knew it eventually would. We feared if we stayed too long in Baja sooner or later as gringos, would be seen as part of the problem, and we would become persona non grata.

Our delayed evacuation plan was based on zero scientific data, but seeing the massive amounts of misinformation already circulating on the interwebs, a gut feeling was the only impulse we could trust. One thing was certain; we had to set up a secure forward operating base. Veronica’s house was located about three miles from the beach. It was the perfect place to wait and see which direction the world would go and an ideal launching point to counter most, if not all scenarios we came up with during an official risk assessment and brain storming session conducted over a bucket full of ice cold mini-Coronas.

For the next three weeks Bobbie and I fell into a kind of routine; sleep late, eat a leisurely breakfast while consuming worrisome world news and catching up on emails, ride to the beach. Routine can be a soothing thing when facing the end of the world as we know it in a country that is not your own, whose government could turn hostile on you at the drop of a sombrero. I thought of the thousands of Mexicans who make the daring run across the border every day and the hostility they have to face at every stage of the journey as we hovered over phones and laptop screens in our terracotta-and-pastel-stucco tactical operations center.

The big question was if and when to leave San Felipe and head for the border crossing at Calexico. There was no good advice and there were no right answers. The world had not seen a pandemic of this magnitude in a hundred-plus years. There was certainly no guidance for people in our unique situation, living off the meager possessions that could fit on the backs of our GS motorcycles far from home and making blind decisions that would affect (and possibly drastically shorten) our lives. During this period of limbo in San Felipe, I was continuously urged by family and friends to return home to America. These pleas were nonstop and utilized a progressive escalation of force and coercion. I was grateful for the concern of everyone, especially my mother, who has patiently put up with more stupid and risky adventures than any mother deserves to. I made my entry to adult life as a paratrooper and moved on from the Army to world travel to my present decision to live as a motorcycle vagabond. Although I am not much for looking in the rear-view, I regretted momentarily all I had put my Mother through every time I heard the worry in her voice over the phone, or sensed it between the lines of one of her text messages.

We received automatic updates from the State Department via email. These communiques were mostly just warnings to get the hell out of Dodge and come back stateside. I couldn’t help but think, “Come back to what?” Since there was no cure and the numbers were steadily rising, it made no sense to return. We looked at the numbers, the collapse of health services and the mounting uncertainty and unrest in our country. In light of all that, every risk analysis we did, whether fueled by tequila, beer or black coffee, all pointed to battening down the hatches and weathering the storm at Veronica’s Airbnb.

Once we made the decision to stay in San Felipe, we started to notice there was plenty going  in the community around us to cast some serious, escalating doubts on the very decision we had just made. The city was in a process of closing down and withdrawing from public life, just like we had seen in Loreto.  Beaches and public entertainment venues were fully closed and stores were boarding up one by one, making it more and more difficult to purchase food, booze and charcoal, all of which are non-negotiables. We ensured our gas tanks were always topped off and kept our gear semi-packed. We were ready to go kickstands up within 15 minutes of any breaking news that gave us a good enough reason to head north. The days started to blend together as I guess they did for a lot of people. I started to realize this was not going to be just another mini-crisis that passes, soon forgotten. The realization dawned on me that this was going to be a massive chapter in history, not only for North America, but for the world.

Through all the progressive shutting down of San Felipe, Baja and probably all of Mexico, one nearby beach remained open: Pete’s Camp. This was a 3-mile ride from our Airbnb base, and it was a priceless afternoon getaway where we could relax on miles of empty beach that faced the beautiful blue waters of the Sea of Cortez. At Pete’s Camp, my mind would drift, sometimes to the highest heights, memories of walking off the ramp of a C17 into clear blue Carolina skies. Other times it got dark on me, and I imagined a post-apocalyptic, post-COVID world. We didn’t know which way the world was going to go. We didn’t know if fear was going to dictate the next chapter in history or if courage and cooler heads would prevail. Occasionally there would be a lonely RV parked at the camp, making its their way north. Some were Canadians who still had a long road ahead. We would chat with these refugee travelers and worried retirees while awkwardly keeping our distance and trying to scavenge any credible news or credible rumors to supplement the politically partisan blamefest that we abused ourselves with daily online.

During a chat with a friendly couple of snowbirds from British Columbia we learned that the Mexican Federales were refusing to let travelers go south, which made sense for Mexico since, at that time, COVID-19 was still more of a problem in the US. Unfortunately for us, we had to ride south a little ways to get on the highway and head north. Heading due north from San Felipe led to nothing but open desert followed by a brick wall, or some kind of wall, known as the US border. So according to my land navigation skills, if we rode twenty miles east or west we would risk being turned around on general suspicion of wanting to head south. If we made it to the highway we could turn north, but if we failed to cross the border due to some kind of Homeland Security snafu or some other fuckup, we would likely not be allowed to return to San Felipe and our base at Vernonica’s because it would be, well… to the south. This scenario was not pleasant to think of. I imagined us being forced into a kind of fenced in refugee camp within sight of California soil, motorcycles confiscated, sitting cross legged on the ground, drinking rust colored water from cut-off Tecate cans. With that vision in my head, I suddenly started feeling some empathy for all the countless people who had been in this position every day for decades, trying to head north, with Mexico saying ‘go on, then’ and the US saying ‘whoa, not so fast’ and a hell of a lot less resources in their pockets than Bobbie and I had at that moment.

Boxed In

We were boxed in, for our own safety as the saying goes, as well as for the safety of everyone around us. I thought about how many times public safety had been used as the reason to keep people from doing what they wanted, whenever the heck they wanted to do it, which pretty much described my life since I left the military, and especially these last three years living off a motorcycle. Under normal conditions, being stuck in a situation like this would cause a significant amount of stress, and it did, but under the new COVID-19 circumstances, it gave us some peace of mind too. The fact was, there were about a thousand percent less people traveling the highways and byways of northern Mexico these days, and under the current circumstances, less people was good.

Although we knew how fortunate we were to be weathering this terrifying time in such a beautiful place, harsh reality began to seep into our lives. Bobbie’s company, which did seismic retrofitting in California, was all but lost. With the real estate market at a standstill, her client base had dried up almost overnight. My own work assignments were starting to dwindle. The thought of being laid off in the face of a full-on economic depression started to creep into our idyllic little Garden of Eden in the desert of northern Baja. After three weeks of sheltering in place at Veronica’s house in San Felipe, the mounting stress of inaction, as it is wont to do, became more painful than confronting our worst-case scenario. We decided to head for Bobbie’s house in Sedona, Arizona, about five hundred miles from our current location. Judging from the news, it seemed, at least for the first wave of this pandemic, that the incidence of new cases was stabilizing and even lowering in some places.

Green Light

Although we discussed new options every day, sometimes every hour, we committed; we decided to decide by Wednesday, the eighth of April. That would allow us a comfortable two days to pack, and we would leave out on Friday, the 10th and make it to Sedona by Saturday or Sunday at the latest. When Friday rolled around, we psyched ourselves up and told each other that it was finally time to leave. We said goodbye to Veronica, ensuring her that once we were safe in Sedona she was welcome to come and stay if the virus hit Baja as badly as we thought it would. We once again loaded the panniers covered with stickers from all the states we had visited. I leaned hard to the right against the added weight and let the kickstand flip up into place. We took a slight detour down the dusty dirt road we had ridden so many times to say a 60mph goodbye to the beach at Pete’s Camp. We were finally returning home to America.

New World

Contrary to my apocalyptic daydreams, we crossed the border without incident. We waited in an almost non-existent line that consisted of a few cars, pickups and RV’s and pretty soon we handed our passports to a friendly Customs and Border Protection officer wearing a surgical mask. He accepted our documents and gave them (and us) a once over, not too fast and not too slow. “Welcome home.” He said. I twisted the throttle and we picked up some of that quiet BMW speed, once again on good American asphalt.

It was still early and cool for Southern Arizona so we stopped at the first beige stucco and Spanish tile Starbucks that came into view. We dismounted and shook off the vibrations both real and metaphysical as we walked up to a sterile window, where we were handed two cups of drip coffee by a young girl wearing a contamination suit and the kind of face shield I’d use to grind the slag off a frame weld. We sipped bitter coffee and looked at each other in our new reality. I tried to stay focused on the beauty of our surroundings and the success of an easy border crossing back to our homeland. We had avoided the refugee camp scenario and I was very thankful and glad to be back on US soil.

Now that we were back in the United States, where were we supposed to go and how would we adapt to this scary new world order as motorcycle nomads? It was a relief to be back in our home country but to what avail? Everyone and everything was fully locked down. Almost nothing was open and no one had worked for weeks or months in some cases. It was a stark contrast to the America we knew just ten short weeks ago.  There would be no gatherings with friends and family at our favorite bistro, Vino’s in West Sedona, to share stories of our adventures in Baja. There would be no popping over to our favorite local watering hole for a cold Four Peak’s IPA while catching up local gossip. Although we had been living in the same isolation south of the border just yesterday, it felt different now being home, because now we owned the problem. Our country had been enjoying record high prosperity when we left just a few months ago, and record low unemployment. Now huge numbers of Americans were unable to work and didn’t know how they would pay their bills, rent and mortgages. We tried to keep the talk light and the mood upbeat as we set up a cozy little camp that afternoon in the Prescott National Forest. We could have ridden straight through, but we wanted to be alone that first night, inhaling the aroma of dry pine on the breeze as we sat around our small fire. We needed the strength and clarity that came from sleeping that first American night on the clean, coarse sand of the high Arizona desert.

A sobering reality set in the next morning as we rode from first light through the lonely desert, now more deserted than ever. The whine of my 1200cc boxer engine and the wind in my helmet were the only sounds on the surreal Arizona landscape that morning. As we blazed on with the rising sun to our right, it felt like our whole country was on a one-way road northbound to Sedona, which I hoped wouldn’t turn out to be a dead end. We continued north, avoiding the freeway, until the soft afternoon light came from the west. We felt the temperature drop a few degrees as we roared over Mingus Mountain Pass in the Coconino National Forest. We leaned extra low and deep into every curve, wanting the bike and the tires to be there for us, to reassure us and support us in this time of uncertainty. Motorcycle riding can give you perspective; it can make existential problems feel distant, forcing you to focus on the here and now. As we descended into the still air and the evening warmth of Sedona, the light of the setting sun shone on the rocks, giving them a warm kind of alpenglow I had never noticed before. I knew that here, in the warm, safe interior of America we would be able to find a moment of solace to shake off the culture shock, gather our thoughts, and lay out our options for putting one tire in front of the other and ask ourselves:  “Where to next?”  The world was changing, radically and on a daily basis. We needed a plan that would fit the need we had for constant motion. We found a lot of courage there in Sedona, in the familiarity of Bobbie’s house, which looked out over a seemingly infinite landscape of red rocks to the south. From that place of courage, I realized that the sun would indeed rise again. It would rise over Veronica’s little house where we had waited out the uncertainty of the first wave and it would rise over any lonely Canadian RVs still parked at Pete’s camp, facing the Sea of Cortez and the new normal. So would it rise over our lives tomorrow and over the lives of our people near and far. Since my days in the 82nd Airborne, failure has never been an option, and this was no time to start considering it. I broke out the bottle of Laphroaig and we began unrolling the maps. The Southwest Operations Center was now established. We got down to the serious business of where to next, knowing we’d be kickstands up in no time.


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Bob’s Vintage Beemers

This blog is about my friend Bob’s vintage BMW collection on display at Brown Motor Works in Pomona, California.

Bob is one of the most interesting people I know.  He’s the founder of Brown BMW and he’s a guy with whom I’ve ridden Baja a couple of times.  He is the fastest and most talented rider I’ve ever known.  I’ve seen Bob riding well-worn BMW police trade-ins (bikes that weigh a hundred pounds more than regular boxer twins) smoke kids on Gixxers.  When he wants to make a point, Bob will outride the Ricky Racers in the twisties while standing on the pegs.

Bob’s dealership does a lot of police motorcycle work, and Bob will usually grab a black and white police motor that’s been turned in (I think he likes those bikes because they’re black and white, like the old Beemers). That’s a police motor you see in the photo of Bob at the start of this blog, and no matter how many times I’ve ridden with Bob, my heart still skips a beat when I see that black and white motorcycle in my rear view mirror. It’s a good thing when we ride in traffic…Bob takes the lead and traffic parts.

But I’m going off topic; the topic of today’s blog is the vintage Beemer collection at Brown Motor Works.

This first bike is a 1928 BMW. It’s a 500cc model, and like all of the bikes in these photos, it’s a boxer twin.

The black-and-white paint themes on the first several bikes make these photos really pop. This used to be the classic BMW colors until maybe the 1970s and it works. It’s a classic color combo.

Here’s a 1936 750cc flathead BMW.

The bike above is interesting. It’s basically the model the Chinese copied, and until recently there were still folks riding around on Chiang Jiang motorcycles in China that are, well, Chinese copies of the old 1930s BMW flathead. In the 1990s, you could go to China and buy a brand new 1936 BMW (made in China under the Chiang Jiang name). It’s the bike my good friend Carla King rode around China.  Those days are gone; you can’t register a motor vehicle more than 10 years old in China today, and they stopped making the Chinese early BMW boxer twin copies at least that long ago for emissions reasons.

This next BMW is a 1952 600cc model.

Here’s a 1951 600cc BMW.

Here’s one with a great story…it’s Bob’s personal 1961 600cc BMW.

Bob calls the bike above the original GS, and for good reason. He rode it all the way to Cabo San Lucas back in the early 1960s. You might be thinking hey, what’s the big deal?  Bob did it before there roads to Cabo. Bob rode the distance on trails and riding along the beach. Sleeping on the beach. Spinning the rear wheel in the sand to let the bike sink in so he wouldn’t have to use the center stand. That is a real adventure ride. Bob was blazing trails in Baja while I was still in elementary school!

More good vintage stuff…here’s a 1971 R75/5 750cc BMW.

Here’s a 1972 model.

Another beautiful BMW classic is the 1976 R90S model. This motorcycle turned heads when it was first introduced, and it is still a show stopper.

The bikes you see in these photos are all in their stock colors. Most amazingly, most of these bikes (including the early ones) are not restorations…they are original motorcycles.

These last two are particularly beautiful.   The first is the 1000cc 1977 R100RS.

And here’s the last bike BMW did in the R100RS configuration, the 1983 1000cc model in a beautiful pin-striped pearl white.

These photos are the results of a few minutes of shutter work on my part, and a lifetime of collecting by Bob Brown at Brown Motor Works.

The one that I found most intriguing was Bob’s early adaptation of a boxer twin into a dual sport.  As I mentioned above, Bob refers to it as the original GS.  When I was in Brown BMW ealier, I saw a current R9T 40th Anniversary model, and it pushed all the right buttons for me.  It’s a little out of my price range, but I sure spent a lot of time looking at it.  It’s one of the nicest ones they’ve ever done, I think.


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A European Moto Blog

One of the recent comments on a Joe Gresh blog post had a website address in it and I visited it.  David Skogley’s East Goes West site is a good one.  David is an American who lives and Germany and writes about his motorcycle travels in Europe.  I wrote to David asking if I could mention his blog on ExNotes and here’s his answer:

Hi Joe,

Many thanks for getting in touch and for your kind words about my blog.

I started the blog about four years ago because I just felt like writing about some of the experiences I was having on bikes in and around Berlin, Germany. I’m certainly not a world traveller (other than long ago on a bicycle) but I figured there probably aren’t that many Americans writing about motorcycling in this neck of the woods, so thought I would give it a shot. In the end, it’s been fun and is interesting to see how my writing has slowly changed, even though I have a very small number of people reading what I put out there. It was never intended to be a money maker, just sort of an online diary, I guess. A way of not forgetting what has gone on in an important part of my life. The writing has become quite sporadic, however, as work (and lethargy) often gets in the way.

I’ve put in very little time or effort regading formatting, and requires a lot of scrolling to find the old entries. Have to change this at some point! Right at the beginning I wrote the following short description/explanation, which is only visible if you go way back to the beginning:

“I moved east to Berlin, Germany from the east coast of the US quite a long time ago. I started riding motorcycles not long after. The intention of this blog is to express some thoughts about motorcycles (and other two-wheeled modes of transportation) and things connected to them.”

A short blog about my blog sounds great! Many thanks for your kind offer.

Regards,

David Skogley

I think you’ll enjoy David’s East Goes West site just as I did.  Here’s the link.


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My Big, Fat, BMW Obsession: A Cautionary Tale

Unlike today, when I tend to mercilessly ridicule BMW motorcycles and their insufferable owners there was a time when I ended up owning several of the damn things. Only one, a 1973 R75/5, was actually bought on purpose. When I got the R75/5 it was in almost new condition and just 2 years old. I was living in Florida and traded a small-window 1957 Volkswagen van and $1300 dollars for the bike to a guy who lived in Fort Lauderdale. That van would be worth a wad of money now but who has time to wait around for the zeitgeist? Certainly not me, I’m a man on the go.

The R75/5 was a great bike. It wasn’t as fast as the Japanese 750’s but it weighed 100 pounds less than those bikes. Weight has always been important to me. The 750 was pretty good off road and I used to take it scrambling over at the Florida East Coast railway yards. The FEC had thousands of unused acres where my pals and I could ride motorcycles, set things on fire and strip down stolen cars.

The biggest problem with the Toaster Tank 750/5 was a really bad high-speed weave. I never got it past 100mph because it was so scary. BMW put a steering damper knob on the top triple clamp but you had to crank it down so tight to stop the weave you could hardly turn. This weave was somewhat cured by a 2” longer swing arm on the /6 models. The next biggest problem on the 750 was a weak charging system. If you ran the headlight too long the piss-poor alternator couldn’t keep the battery hot enough to use the electric start. I rode that BMW all over the USA in 1975 and had to kick start it most of the way.

My next BMW came along when I was living in San Diego, California. It was a R60/5 with a faded pink, 6-gallon gas tank. It was one of those cheap deals that you buy just because it’s so cheap. I think I paid around $100 for the bike because the engine didn’t run. The R60/5 model was 600cc. On R60s the final drive was re-geared to reflect the lower horsepower. The only one I ever rode was dramatically slower than the 750. It was a lot slower than the 150cc difference would have you believe and wouldn’t go fast enough to weave. I never liked the 600cc BMW because it was such a dog. I ended up with one anyway.

I unstuck the pistons and took the $100 R60/5 engine apart. It wasn’t in bad shape inside so I decided to lightly hone the cylinders and put new piston rings in the thing. My buddy Glenn and I rode my 550 Honda 4-banger up to a Los Angeles BMW dealer to get parts. That’s how it was, if you were going to LA for parts your buddy might tag along just for something to do. We didn’t have cell phones. I don’t remember if there was a BMW dealer in San Diego back then. It was kind of a one-horse town and you had to go north to LA for a lot of reasons. I’ve also forgotten the name of the dealer I went to but I think it was off the 405 somewhere, maybe Long beach.

Amazingly the BMW dealer had the rings in stock but wanted $35 per piston for each set of 3 rings or $70 plus tax. I was stunned at the cost. I was earning $3.25 an hour back then. You could get 8 pistons, 8 wristpins and 8 sets of rings for a Chevy small-block for $100. You could buy 2 brand new Volkswagen jugs and 4 pistons plus rings for $100. I owned cars that cost less than $70.

I remember getting pissed off at the BMW parts guy and yelling at him, “I’ll make my own damn rings!” and storming out of the place. Outside the dealership Glenn tried to talk some sense into me. “Where else are you going to get rings?” He said. I was kind of stubborn, “Screw it I’ll make them.” I said again, but not as loudly as before. We rode back to San Diego without any BMW parts.

Turns out, making piston rings is not so easy. I tried to find an engine that used a piston the same size as the R60 but time passed and the R60/5 just sat there in pieces. I ended up selling the R60/5 to Glenn for the same amount of money as I paid for it. Glenn rode back alone to the same BMW dealer and bought the rings. He eventually got the bike running but it was so boring to ride he sold it shortly thereafter.

I was done with BMWs for 25 years or so until my buddy Roger gave me his basket case R60/5 when I was living in the Florida Keys. Roger had taken the bike apart after another guy had crashed it and bent the frame. Roger said to me “I’m never going to get that bike running, do you want it?” And like the idiot I am I said “Yes I do.”

Those old, oval-tube BMW frames are some tough cookies. It took a lot of heat and hammering to get it fairly straight again. I discovered Bob’s mail order BMW store and finally purchased that set of rings. They were still $35 a side but I was making a bit more money so it didn’t seen so bad. Plus, I had calmed down over the years.

I freshened up the R60’s engine, cleaned the carbs, and painted the now kinda-straight-ish frame. I bought a new exhaust system to replace the smashed original ones, got new tires and tubes, took a kink out of the front wheel and had myself a roller. I pulled dents out of the 6-gallon tank and bonded it up a bit, then painted the tank and started assembling the motorcycle. I had it a few days from running when the hurricane hit.

Four feet of storm surge flooded the shed where the R60/5 was parked. The engine and gas tank were full of salt water. Our house was wrecked. Our other vehicles were submerged and ruined. It was a disaster. All I had time to do was to drain the salt water out of the Beemer’s engine and flush it with gasoline. As you can imagine, new, more urgent projects sprung up and I finally gave the BMW to another buddy, Charlie.

Charlie tinkered with the bike for a few months but the engine finally seized up and he sold it for $200 to some other poor sucker. So you can see why I’m a bit shirty when it comes to BMWs. I mock them to cover my pain. We have had a long, tortured history, BMW and I, and in that long history I nearly always come out on the losing end.


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Bill’s Old Bike Barn: Guzziland and Motomilitaria

One of the main halls in Bill’s Old Bike Barn features Moto Guzzi and military motorcycles along with other militaria, motorcycle engines, and more.  We know Moto Guzzi primarily as sporting motorcycles.  Back in the day, though (the day being World War II and beyond), Moto Guzzi made motorcycles for the Italian Army.  Good buddy Bill has a few and they are on display, along with military motos from Germany and America and sporting Moto Guzzis.

There’s just so much to take in. I imagine Bill enjoys collecting and curating these things. That’s a cargo parachute, and it fits the collection nicely. There are several airplanes throughout Bill’s Old Bike Barn.

The Harley WL comes to mind first when anyone mentions military motorcycles.  It’s the iconic World War II American military motorcycle.  It’s a 750cc flathead V-twin, OD green, and it has a scabbard for a .45 ACP Thompson (and there’s one in Bill’s WL).

The quintessential American military moto, also used by Canadian forces. When I was a kid, we heard stories that you could buy these brand new, still in the shipping crates, for $25. I never found out if that story was true.

The German counterpart was a 750cc flathead BMW and sidecar. Zündapp also provided sidecar bikes to the Wehrmacht.  And BMW also had a 600cc overhead valve model.  Bill has a BMW with sidecar on display in this hall, but it’s a later model (note the overhead valve engine configuration).

A World War II BMW with sidecar.

Here’s another interesting military motorcycle:  The 1946 500cc single-cylinder Moto Guzzi Alce.  You wouldn’t think a motorcycle would be notable for its sidestand, but that’s one of the first things I noticed about it and Bill made the same comment.  If you’ve ever tried to park a motorcycle in soft sand, you’ll know what this motorcycle is all about.

A 1946 Moto Guzzi Alce. It’s also the cover photo for this blog.  Note the passenger handlebars.
A macro shot of the Alce storage compartments.
This is a serious kickstand. I could have used this in a few spots in Baja!

Harley-Davidson wandered into the military motorcycle world when they bought the Armstrong-CCM company in 1987.  Armstrong had a 500cc single-cylinder Rotax-powered bike and Harley probably thought they would make a killing selling these to the US Army, but they were a day late and more than a dollar short.  The Army had zero interest in gasoline-powered vehicles (the US Army has been 100% diesel powered for decades…I knew that when I was in the Army in the 1970s).  The effort was quickly abandoned.  That’s the bad news.  The good news?  The Harley MT 500 military bikes became instant collectibles.   And Bill’s Old Bike Barn has one.

A Harley-Davidson MT-500. “MT” was an abbreviation for military transport; it more accurately was an acronym for sales results (as in “empty”).
Interesting, but for Harley it was no cigar.

The military room also houses the Moto Guzzi Mulo Meccanico, and motorcycle half-track featured in an earlier ExNotes blog.

The Mulo Meccanico, a case study for why complexity for complexity’s sake always comes in second place. Intended to replace live mules in Italian Army service, the real donkeys had the last laugh. Or was it a hee haw?

The Mulo and the Alce military bike share real estate in Bill’s Old Bike Barn, along with commercial and very desirable Moto Guzzi non-military motorcycles.  Here’s an early 1970s Moto Guzzi Ambassador.

A Moto Guzzi Ambassador from the early 1970s, when Bill was a Moto Guzzi dealer.

Bill’s Old Bike Barn includes what has to be the definitive Moto Guzzi motorcycle classic, the Falcone 500.  In case you’ve ever wondered, it’s pronounced “fowl-cone-ay.”  Fire engine red is a color that works well on Moto Guzzis.

A beautiful 1951 Moto Guzzi Falcone, also known as the baloney slicer for its exposed flywheel on the bike’s left side.
A 1000cc Moto Guzzi sports bike.

One of the more unique “motorcycles” in Bills Old Bike Barn is a 1961 motorcycle-based dump truck.   Bill kept it in its original unrestored condition for a number of years and used it to haul manure around on his farm (I used to write proposals in the defense industry, so Bill and I have that in common).  Bill cleaned up the Guzzi dump truck, customized it with a show-worthy paint job, and made it too pretty to use.  This is a three wheeler built around the same 500cc Falcone baloney-slicer motor shown above.

A Moto Guzzi trike dump truck. Gresh and I have a thing for three wheelers reaching back to our ride across China. Bill used this one for hauling manure around the farm.
The Guzzi dump truck’s motorcycle underpinnings are obvious.
Stunning by any standard.

So there you have it, folks.  This is the last in our series of blogs about Bill’s Old Bike Barn.  I enjoyed my visit to Bill’s more than I have to any other museum, partly because of the content and partly because of Bill.  If you’re looking for a worthy destination and an experience like no other, Bill’s Old Bike Barn should be at the top of your list.  I’d allow a full day for the visit, maybe with a break for lunch.  We asked Bill for the best kept secret regarding Bloomsburg fine dining and his answer was immediate:  The Scoreboard.  It’s only a mile or two away and you can Waze your way there.  Try the chili; it’s excellent.


There are six blogs in our series about Bill’s Old Bike Barn.  Here’s a set of links to the first five:

Our first blog on Bill’s Old Bike Barn?  Hey, here it is:

Bill Morris:  The Man.   It’s a great story.

Military motorcycle half-tracks?  You bet!

With 200 motorcycles in his collection, Bill’s personal favorite might surprise you!

What drives a man like Bill to collect?  Our story on Billville and the Collections answers the mail:


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Devils Tower: Close Encounters of the Motorcycle Kind

Most of us have seen the 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  It’s what we think of when we see Devils Tower (which I’ll get to in just a bit).  Before I do, consider this question:  Are there close encounters of the first, second, fourth, and fifth kind?   The short answer is:  Yes.

The concept of classifying suspected alien encounters came from a guy named Allen Hynek.  Hynek defined the first three categories, and then two more were added.  Here at ExhaustNotes, we try to formulate the questions you might have before you even know you have them, so we did.   Here’s the answer to what has been keeping you up at night.

    • Close Encounters of the First Kind: These are viewings of unidentified flying objects less than 500 feet away.  They are relatively rare, like seeing a GS 1200 actually in the dirt.
    • Close Encounters of the Second Kind: These involve unidentified flying objects with some sort of associated physical effect, like interference with your vehicle’s ignition or radio, animals reacting to a sensed alien presence, or an alien craft leaving impressions on the ground. They are things for which there simply is no earthly explanation.  I think $1500 freight and setup charges on new motorcycles fall into this category.
    • Close Encounters of the Third Kind: This is the one we all know about. It’s when you climb to the top of Devil’s Tower for an alien rock concert and laser show. Seriously, though, the people who write these descriptions say a close encounter of the third kind involves things like seeing a living being inside an unidentified flying object. In the motorcycling world, I guess it would be like waving at a Starbuck’s-bound GS rider and having him return the wave.
    • Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: This is when the aliens abduct you.  I imagine it would be a lot like a free weekend at a posh resort, but you have to listen to the time-share pitch.
    • Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: These involve direct communications between humans and aliens. These actually happen to me a lot, and they usually start with unsolicited cell phone calls for solar power, paying off student loans, extending car warranties, or contributing to a Hillary Clinton campaign. These people have to be from outer space.  No Earthling would ever expect me to go for any of the above.

So there you have it.  On to the topic of this blog, and that’s Devils Tower, Wyoming.  It’s awesome, and if you haven’t made the trek it needs to be on your list.

I first visited Devils Tower when we toured South Dakota’s Black Hills and Mount Rushmore in nearby South Dakota.  Devils Tower was a short 90 miles to the west, I’d seen the movie, and I had to see the place in person.  It was worth the trip.  Instantly recognizable, the dark tower climbs 867 feet above its surroundings.  Eerie is not too strong an adjective.  The thing just looks other-worldly, and attributing the divine, the supernatural, or an extraterrestrial vibe to Devils Tower is a natural reaction.  No fewer than six Native American peoples, Steven Spielberg, and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt have done exactly that.  I get it, and when you see Devils Tower in person, you will, too.

I also visited Devils Tower when we rode the RX3s through western America with a crew from China and Colombia (that’s what the video above is from).  It’s in a good part of the country…Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills, the Badlands, and more are in this area and the riding is awesome.  If you ever do Sturgis, Devils Tower needs to be one of your stops, but it’s best to see this part of the world when the Sturgis Rally is not underway (there is such a thing as too many motorcycles, and the tattoos, open pipes, and body odor that goes with Sturgis gets old quickly).

One of the things that makes Devils Tower so dramatic is its distinctiveness; it just doesn’t look like it should be there.  Even the experts can’t agree on how it came to be. The rock docs agree that it was formed by magma (molten rock) forcing itself up between other rocks; what they argue about is how this occurred. One camp holds that the formation was pushed upward by molten rock below, another that Devils Tower once was a larger structure worn down by erosion, and yet another feels the tower is the throat of an ancient volcano.  To get geologic for a moment, it is a laccolithic butte (a wonderful term that could be applied to a few people I know) comprised of phonolite porphyry (dark-colored rock).  Devils Tower is comprised of sharply-defined trapezoidal columns with four, five and sometimes seven sides. They look like they were machined, and in a sense, I guess they were.

The Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Arapaho, Shoshone and Kiowa Native Americans all treat Devils Tower and its surrounding regions as sacred ground.  Theodore Roosevelt designated it the first U.S. national monument in 1906.  Native American names for the monolith include mato tipila (bear lodge), the bear’s tipi, the bear’s home, the tree rock, and the great gray horn.  An 1875 U.S. Army expedition misinterpreted one of the Native American names as Bad Gods Tower, and that became Devils Tower.

The Tower is visible from great distances — there’s no missing it or mistaking it for anything else — and the ride in provides varying perspectives.  Once inside the National Park, you can walk to the base, you can take a hike around Devils Tower, or you can climb to the top.  I’ve been there several times, and I think it’s one of our great destinations.


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BMW’s R 18: The UberCycle

A colossal motorcycle, and I generally don’t like colossal motorcycles, but the BMW R 18 is somehow strangely appealing to me.  It’s beautiful, actually.  It’s the first one I’ve seen.  Gresh did a Dream Bike piece on this bike when BMW first released the concept.   Unlike most concept vehicles, the R 18 crossed the great divide and made it into production.   This was the first one I’ve seen.   I wouldn’t buy an R 18, but that doesn’t stop me from admiring it.

Did I mention this thing is colossal?

I recently stayed in Alpharetta, Georgia, while on my latest secret mission.   While on the Alpharetta assignment, my digs were a fancy hotel called the Avalon.  It’s in a high end mall with outdoor shops and a setup intended to evoke feelings of an earlier time.  You know, Main Street USA, with downtown shops and apartments above the shops.  It’s a trend in new shopping malls that I like and apparently so do a lot of other people.

In the evening the Avalon mall is a place to be seen with high end driveway jewelry, and the R 18 seemed right at home parked between a Mercedes UberWagen and a Rolls Royce SUV while Ferraris, Lambos, and McClarens growled by at 10 miles per hour.  For you BMW types, not to worry:  Avalon has the requisite Starbuck’s.

I did mention this motorcycle is huge, didn’t I?  How’s a 68-inch wheelbase and a 761-pound weight sound?

The idea behind the R 18 was to create an obese cruiser evoking BMW’s earlier history.  Not too far back, mind you.  They didn’t want to put swastikas on the thing (something BMW doesn’t really mention in their history…I suppose it wouldn’t be “woke”), but the ’60s were safe and the R60 styling works.  Take a look at this R60 I photographed at Bob Brown’s So Cal BMW shop and you’ll see what I mean.

BMW is obviously positioning the R 18 against Harley and other lardass cruisers, and they more than succeeded. In fact, I’d say they out-Harleyed Harley. To me, the last Big Twin Harley that had the right look was the Evo-engine Softails.  Everything since from “The Motor Company” looks out of proportion to me.  And for the uninitiated, “The Motor Company” is how rugged individualists who dress alike, have the same belt size and tattoos, and shop at the same do-rag supplier refer to Harley-Davidson.  The implication, of course, is that there is only one company that matters manufacturing internal combustion engines.  Ah, ignorance is so bliss.  Anyway, the R 18 is kind of like the Evo Softails: It is colossal, but all the pieces seem to fit well with each other and it successfully chasm crosses to an earlier, presumably better, Horst-Wessel-free time.  I like it.

A few more styling comparisons between the old and the new…

Like Harley and the whole Made in ‘Murica shtick, BMW is capitalizing on a “Berlin Built” mantra.

Berlin Built.  Seriously?

Berlin Built.  I can’t make this stuff up, folks.

I was getting into photographing the R 18, and as I was doing so, I hoped the owner would appear so I could ask him a few questions about the motorcycle (maybe that’s sexist; for all I knew, the owner might be a woman).  That didn’t happen, but I sure had fun working my iPhone magic on this two ton Teutonic twin…

The R 18 styling works for me.   I like the old-style BMW roundels, the steelhead trout mufflers (my term, not Berlin’s), the exposed shaft drive, and more.  If it were me, I would have made the bike a bit smaller, I would have found a way to incorporate a finned version of the GS1250 engine, and maybe I would have used Earles forks rather the R 18’s telescoping front end.  But hey, I don’t sell zillions of motorcycles a year and the Boys from Bavaria do.  As UberCycles go, the R 18’s approximately $20K entry ticket doesn’t seem out of line.  It’s not my cup of kartoffelsuppe, but I think the bike is beautiful.


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